8 Westjield Terrace, Aberdeen ^ 
Dec. 12, 1 1 



GINN &r> CO. : 

Gentlemen, — / /tave much pleasure in acknowledging your liberal 
offer to pay me on your reprint of my Characteristics of English Poets 
the same royalty that you pay to American authors. This offer seems 
to me quite satisfactory , and I accept it at once. 

Yours very truly, 

WILLIAM MINTO. 



CHARACTERISTICS 



OF 



ENGLISH POETS 



FROM CHAUCER TO SHIRLEY 



BY 



WILLIAM MINTO, M.A. 

n 

PROFESSOR OF LOGIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE 
UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN 



giutl^ori^cb '^mtxxtnvi €biliott 



BOSTON, U.S.A. 
PUBLISHED BY GINN & COMPANY 






Typography by }. S. Gushing & Co., Boston, U.S.A. 



Pkesswork by Ginn & Co., Boston, U.S.A. 



48 65 5 5 

AUG -6 1942 



ti 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 

Two things are attempted in the following work, which the 
author believes have not hitherto been systematically accom- 
plished. My chief object has been to bring into as clear light 
as possible the characteristics of the several poets within the 
period chosen. And as a secondary object to this, I have 
endeavoured to trace how far each poet was influenced by 
his Uterary predecessors and his contemporaries. This is what 
I have attempted to do. The reader must not in this volume 
expect to find the works of our poets treated with reference to 
their race or their social surroundings. " What sort of a man 
was he?" not "How was he formed?" is the leading question 
to which I have endeavoured to supply an answer. 

In thus deliberately adopting a method that is in one vital 
respect the opposite of M. Taine's I should be sorry if it were 
supposed that I am insensible to the value of what M. Taine 
has done for English literature. It may be, as one of his 
critics has said, that M. Taine has added little to the popular 
conception of the Englishman, as expressed in the nickname 
"John Bull"; but none the less on that account is it a great 
and valuable work to have shown that the characteristics thus 
vaguely summed up really pervade the whole of our literature. 
Justly viewed, indeed, the method pursued in this volume is not 
so much the opposite as the complement of M. Taine's. His 
endeavour was to point out what our writers had in common ; 
mine has been to point out what each has by distinction. I 
might advance, as a justification of my attempt, that a thorough 
study of the individual is indispensable to that higher study 
which has for its object the determination of the characteristics of 
the race. And besides, the most interesting study for mankind 
will always be the individual man. 



VI PREFACE. 

It may be objected to my method that it does not syste- 
matically follow successive periods in the career of the indi- 
vidual, the opening of new . veins, the development of new 
powers, the subjection to new influences. That is a method 
by itself, with its own value and its own dangers. It is the 
method suitable to monographs, or to history on a larger scale 
than is here attempted. I must say that it seems to me to 
have been of late somewhat overdone. It has been pursued 
without due respect to the individuality of the individual. 
Men's lives have been divided into clear-cut periods, and those 
periods characterised as if it were a law of nature that the 
individual became at sudden and definite epochs a wholly new 
creature. All division into periods, unless cautiously carried 
out, tends to obscure the fact that every animated being retains 
its individual characteristics from birth to maturity, from maturity 
to decay. The child is father to the man : a young cabbage 
does not become an old fig-tree. To trace the gradual growth of 
powers and qualities, extended range of effort, increased mastery 
of materials, is a most interesting task. This I have inciden- 
tally endeavoured to do. But I conceive that it is of prior 
interest to know what characteristics are of the essence of a 
man's being, and are manifested in all his outcomes ; and there- 
fore my chief aim in each case has been to seize those charac- 
teristics, and to make my interpretation of them as plain and 
unmistakable as lay in my power. 

A smaller point in which I am especially open to hostile 
criticism, is the modernised spelling of the texts of Chaucer 
and his contemporaries and immediate successors. I have done 
this after much consideration, resolving to attempt it more by 
way of experiment and for the purpose of eliciting opinion, 
than from any settled conviction that it is the only proper 
course. I am not insensible to the charm of the archaic spell- 
ing ; and I know that to some minds modernisation of spelling 
is as obnoxious as the performance of Othello in a dress-coat. 
My object is to help my readers to forget such small points as 
orthographical differences between them and those poets of an 
elder time, and to get nearer to the living spirit of them. The 
tendency of all archaisims, as I shall point out more fully in the 



PREFACE. Vll 

case of Chaucer, is to impart into the text a sentiment of old 
age and childishness, very delightful in itself, but not so favour- 
able to truth of criticism. 

W. MINTO. 
August I, 1874. 



PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. 

There are three points in particular on which I have made 
any considerable alteration from the text of the first edition 
— the relation of Chaucer to the English Court and to French 
poetry (chap, i.) ; the connection, or rather the non-connection, 
of the Wars of the Roses with the decadence of English poetry 
in the fifteenth century (chap. ii. sect, iii.) ; and the " causes " 
of the development of the Elizabethan drama (chap. vi.). On 
these points I have tried to express more fully and clearly the 
views originally put forward. In revising this edition I have 
gained less than I had expected from the enormous mass of 
interesting commentary on Chaucer and Shakespeare published 
within the last ten years, the reason doubtless being that my 
book is concerned with one main purpose — the exposition of 
the characters, personal and artistic, of the poets dealt with. 
Every student of English literature must rejoice to find so many 
able and ingenious scholars at work in this field, and everybody 
must be sensible of the great value of their results ; but as regards 
my own special purpose, I have not found occasion for material 
change. How far this is due to prejudice and preoccupation, 
others must judge. 

Some of the writer's incidental essays in the hazardous work 
of verifying anonymous allusions in EHzabethan literature, have 
been more favourably received than he had ventured to hope. 
Two of them have been almost universally accepted, the iden- 
tification of the rival poet of Shakespeare's Sonnets with Chap- 
man, and the identification of Spenser's "Action" with Drayton, 
under his poetical name "Rowland." The identification of " Our 
pleasant Willy " with Sidney, and of " That same gentle Spirit " 
with Spenser himself (Appendix A), I regard as equally certain, 



Vlll PREFACE. 

but such does not seem to be the general opinion of those who 
have taken any notice of my arguments. 

The discussion of the age and character of Hamlet is much 
more argumentative than I should make it now when Goethe's 
view of the character is less generally accepted. The views 
I contended for were novel at the time. The arguments for 
Hamlet's age contained in the body of the play (see p. 309) had 
strangely escaped the notice of Shakespearian critics. 

I have added in an Appendix a commendatory sonnet, of 
date 1 59 1, and have put forward some considerations, originally 
printed in the ' Examiner ' some ten years ago, for believing it to 
be Shakespeare's. I cannot expect many to take the trouble of 
following arguments of such minuteness. Most readers will judge, 
as I did myself at first, from a general impression. But I must 
beg those who do interest themselves in such a dilettante inquiry, 
to observe the nature of my argument, that it is not founded on 
single coincidences of expression, such as might be made out 
from any EHzabethan author, but on coincidence with a whole 
circle of associated ideas, images, and words. 

W. M. 

August, 1885. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. — GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 

PAGE 

I. His Life, Character, and Works, ....... i 

II. His Words, INIetres, and Imagery, . . . . . . -17 

III. The Chief Qualities of his Poetry, ...... 25 

IV. His Dehneation of Character, ....... 39 



CHAPTER II. —CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES • 
AND SUCCESSORS. 

I. English Contemporaries, — 

I. William Langland. — 2. John Cower. — 3. Miracle-plays and 
Mysteries. — 4. Metrical Romances, ..... 45 

II. Scottish Contemporaries, — 

I. Barbour. — 2. Blind Harry, . . . . . . ' ^5 

III. English Successors, — 

I. Occleve. — 2. Lydgate. — 3. Sir Thomas Malory. — 4. John 
Skelton. — 5. Stephen Hawes, ...... 69 

IV. Scottish Successors, — 

I. James I. — 2. Robert Henryson. — 3. William Dunbar. — 4. 
Gawain Douglas. — 5. Sir David Lindsay. — 6. North-Country 
Ballad-Makers, 93 



CHAPTER III. — RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

I. Wyat, 116 

11. Surrey, ............ 123 

in. Writers of Mysteries, Moralities, Moral Interludes — John Bale, . 130 
IV. John Heywood — Merry Interludes, . . . . . '135 

V. Udall — Ralph Roister Doister, 139 

VI. Sackville, . 143 



X CONTENTS. 

VII. Edwards, 150 

VIII. Gascoigne, 153 

IX. Churchyard, . . . . . . . . . .158 

X. Translators of Seneca and Ovid, 159 

CHAPTER IV. — EDMUND SPENSER. 

I. His Life and Character, 163 

II. His Words, Metres, and Imagery, 168 

III. The Chief Qualities of his Poetry, 171 



CHAPTER v. — ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

I. Sidney, 185 

II. Daniel, 191 

III. Constable, 195 

IV. Lodge, 197 

V. Watson, 203 

VI. Drayton, 205 

VII. Shakespeare — Sonnets, 210 



CHAPTER VI. — DRAMATISTS BEFORE 
SHAKESPEARE. 



I. Lyly, . 
II. Marlowe, 

III. Greene, 

IV. Peele, . 
V. Nash, . 

VI. Kyd, 
VII. Munday, 
VIII. Chettle, 



228 
230 
240 
246 
250 
251 
253 
253 



CHAPTER VII. — WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 

I. His Life and Character, . . . . . . . -257 

II. His Words and Imagery, ........ 274 

III. Certain Qualities of his Poetry, ....... 278 

IV. His Delineation of Character, 305 

V. The Interaction of his Characters, 317 

VI. The Tranquillising Close of his Tragedies, ..... 319 



CONTENTS. 



XI 



CHAPTER VIII. — SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEM- 
PORARIES AND SUCCESSORS. 



I. Chapman, 
II. Marston, 

III. Jonson, 

IV. Dekker, 

V. Middleton, 

VI. Fletcher, 

VII. Webster, 

VIII. Tourneur, 

IX. Ford, . 

X. Massinger, 

XI. Shirley, 



325 

332 

337- 

344 

347 

349 

354 

357 
360 

363 
366 



APPENDIX A — "Our Pleasant Willy" 368 

APPENDIX B — An Unrecognised Sonnet by Shakespeare? . 371 



CHARACTERISTICS 



OF 



ENGLISH POETS. 



CHAPTER I. 

GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 

(1340-1400.) 

I. — His Life, Character, and Works. 

To regard Chaucer as the first genial day in the spring of English 
poetry, is to take, perhaps, a somewhat insular view of his position. 
On a more comprehensive view, it would appear more apposite to 
call him a fine day, if not the last fine day, in the autumn of 
medii^val European poetry. He may be described as the father 
of English poetry — the first great poet that used the English 
language ; but it is more instructive to look upon him as the 
English son and heir of a great family of French and Italian 
poets. He was the great English master in a poetic movement 
that originated in the south of Europe, among the provinces of 
the Langue d'Oc, which had been going on with brilliant energy 
for more than two centuries before his birth, and had produced 
among its masterpieces the ' Romance of the Rose,' and the poetry 
of Dante and Petrarch. 

How the Troubadours came by their poetry is not, and perhaps 
cannot be, sufficiently ascertained. Probably great significance 



2 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 

ought to be attached to the fact that the south of France and 
the east coast of Spain received a large infusion of Greek blood 
from the Phocfean colonists of MassiHa (now Marseilles) and their 
offshoots. These Greek colonists were something more than 
a handful of adventurous settlers, such as might be absorbed in 
a community without appreciably affecting its character. Their 
chief city, Massilia, soon after its foundation, became one of the 
most prosperous and powerful communities on the coasts of the 
Mediterranean, the successful rival of Carthage, the independent 
ally of Rome, and, under the early emperors, the chief dispenser 
of liberal education to the young rulers of the world. It may well 
have been that, in these representatives of her race, taken from the 
home of lyric poetry — the region of Alcaeus and Sappho — ancient 
Greece left to Western Europe a more precious bequest, a bequest 
that gave a more vital impulse to modern literature than all the 
fragments of her art. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the 
various provinces speaking the Langue d'Oc, and especially Pro- 
vence, were in a high state of commercial prosperity and political 
freedom. We may therefore, in the absence of certain knowledge, 
venture to speculate that, when the Provengals, having achieved 
the material basis for a great literary outburst, came in contact 
with Arabian poetry through the Moors, the artistic tendency of 
the Greek quickened with irrepressible life, and throwing itself 
into the metrical forms that had given it the awakening stimulus, 
blossomed and bore fruit with voluptuous luxuriance. But what- 
ever may have been the origin of Provengal poetry — however the 
Troubadours caught their happy art, found it, or came by it — they 
certainly are the poetic fathers of the Trouveres and the early 
Italian poets ; and through them the grandfathers of our own 
Chaucer. 

Although the Trouveres of the north of France received their 
impulse from the Troubadours of the south, they were not simply 
imitators and translators, rendering the productions of the Langue 
d'Oc into the Langue d'Oil. The bent of their genius was no less 
decidedly epic than the bent of the Troubadours was lyric. They 
poured out of fertile imaginations hundreds of chivalrous, amorous, 
and humorous tales. The history of this great creative movement, 
within its limits of two centuries, is a subject in itself. English- 
men took part in it, as a result of the close political connection 
between England and the north of France, but no writer of mark 
used any dialect of English. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote in 
Latin ; Walter Map in French. These are great names in the 
literature of England and of the Middle Ages, but they do not 
belong to English literature. 

Chaucer was the first writer for all time that used the Englishs^ 
language. But viewed as a figure in European Hterature, he must 



HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. 3 

be regarded as the last of the Trouveres. His works float on the 
surface of the same Hterary wave ; a deep gulf lies between them 
and the next, on the crest of which are the works of our great 
Elizabethans. Some patriotic Englishmen have strongly resented 
the endeavour of M. Sandras ^ to consider Chaucer as an imitator 
of the Trouveres. They are justified in taking offence at the word 
"imitator." It is too much to say that Chaucer produced nothing 
but imitations of G. de Lorris or other Trouveres, till he conceived 
the plan of the ' Canterbury Tales ' ; and that the ' Canterbury 
Tales,' though so far original in form, are animated throughout by 
the spirit of Jean de Meun. To say this is to produce a totally 
false impression as regards the decided individuality and pro- 
nounced English characteristics of Chaucer. He undoubtedly 
belongs to the line of the Trouveres. He was a disciple of theirs ; 
he studied in the school of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, 
by the side of Guillaume de Machault and Eustache Deschamps. 
He adopted the same poetical machinery of vision and allegory. 
He made the same elaborate studies of colour and form. From 
French predecessors he received the stimulus to his minute obser- 
vation of character. It was emulation of them that kindled his 
happy genius for story-telling. The relation between Chaucer and 
the Trouveres is much closer than the relation between Shake- 
speare and the foreign originals that supplied him with plots, or 
than the relation between Mr Tennyson and the Arthurian 
legends. Making allowance for differences of national character, 
Chaucer owed as much to Guillaume de Lorris as Shakespeare to 
Marlowe, or Tennyson to Wordsworth ; and in spite of national 
character, there was probably more affinity between pupil and 
master in the one case than in the others. At the same time, 
we should keep clear of such a word as imitation, which would 
imply that Chaucer had no character of his own. He received his 
impulse from the French : he made liberal use of their forms and 
their materials ; yet his works bear the impress and breathe the 
spirit of a strong individuality ; and this individuality, though 
most obvious in the ' Canterbury Tales,' is throughout all his 
works distinctively English. Finally, to add one word on the 
comparative extent of Chaucer's obligations to Italian sources : 
while he translated largely from Boccaccio, and while it may be 
possible to trace an expansion of his poetic ideals coincident with 
the time when he may be supposed to have made his first acquaint- 
ance with Italian poetry, it is not to be questioned that he was 
most deeply indebted for general form, imagery, and character- 
ization to the Trouveres, whose language and works he must have 
been famihar with from boyhood. 

1 Etude sur G. Chaucer, considere comme imitaleur des Trouveres, 1859. See, 
in particular, Mr Furnivall's ' Trial-Forewords,' Chaucer Society. 



4 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 

Various circumstances helped to bring the son of a London 
vintner under the influence of French poetry. Many details of 
Chaucer's life have been gradually recovered by successive genera- 
tions of antiquaries, from Thynne and Speght to Nicolas and Fur- 
nivall/ but none of them is more significant as regards the influ- 
ences that shaped the growing poet than the recently discovered 
fact that in 1357 he was a page in the household of Prince Lionel. 
His age was then probably fifteen, or at the utmost seventeen, and 
whether or not he had been at Cambridge before — the University 
age being then much younger than it is now — this position en- 
sured him the best education of the time. And while the youth 
was in this much-coveted service, a great public event happened. 
The French king, captured at Poictiers by the Black Prince, was 
brought to London in triumph. In accordance with the chivalrous 
usage then dominant at the English Court, the royal prisoner, so 
far from being treated with indignity, was received with as much 
show of respect and gorgeous ceremony as if he had been a dis- 
tinguished potentate on a friendly visit. He brought a large reti- 
nue with him, and he was lodged in what was then considered the 
finest house in England, John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace. During 
his four years' captivity, tournaments were frequently held in his 
honoury hunting and hawking parties were arranged for his diver- 
sion, and everything possible was done to make life pleasant for 
him. Chaucer, as a member of Prince Lionel's household, must 
have made the acquaintance of some of King John's numerous 
retinue. He would naturally be thrown into company with youths 
in a similar position to himself, and as one of a page's duties was 
to amuse his master or mistress with reading, and the French king was 
a lover of poetry, Chaucer must thus have had his attention vividly 
turned, if it had not been turned before, to the French poetry then 
fashionable. Soon afterwards he had another opportunity. The 
page was advanced to the dignity of "squire" in 1359, and in 
Edward HL's unfortunate expedition of that year into France, was 
taken prisoner and detained till the following year. Of his treat- 
ment during this captivity we know nothing specific, but we may 
assume from the custom of the time that it was not harsh, and that 
the young squire, if he had a passion for poetry, would have access 
to congenial company. The king paid ;£i6 for his ransom after 
the Peace of Bretigny. 

It may almost be said to have been an accident that Chaucer 
did not write in French, as his contemporary Gower began by 
doing. But he had the sense to discern a capable literary instru- 
ment in the nascent English, which the king at this time was 

1 Of late years Mr Furnivall and the Chaucer Society have left hardly a paper 
unturned in extant official records. 



HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. 5 

doing his utmost to encourage. A poet is not begotten by cir- 
cumstances, but circumstances may do much to make or mar him, 
and a man of genius, able to make the new language move in 
verse, was sure of a warm welcome at the Court of Edward III. 
The atmosphere was most favourable to the development of a poet 
of genial pleasure-loving disposition. Edward's reign was the 
flowering period of chivalry in England. It was the midsummer, 
the July, of chivalry ; the institution was then in full blossom. 
All that it is customary to say about the gladness of life in the 
England of Chaucer's time was true of the Court ; if a whole na- 
tion could be gladdened by the beautiful life of a favoured few, 
then all England must have been happy and merry. Pageantry 
was never more gorgeous or more frequent, courtesy of manner 
never more refined. The Court was like the Garden of Mirth in 
the ' Romance of the Rose ' ; there were hideous figures on the 
outside of the walls, but inside all was sunshine and merry-making, 
and now and then the doors were thrown open and gaily attired 
parties issued forth to hunt or tournament. These amusements 
were arranged on a scale of unparalleled splendour. 

It was a most gladsome and picturesque life at the Court of 
Edward III., and in that Hfe Chaucer's poetry was an incident. 
This is a key to its joyous character. Animated playing on the 
surface of passion without breaking the crust, humorous pretence 
of incapacity when dull or difficult subjects come in the way, an 
eye for the picturesque, abundant supply of incident, never-failing 
fertility of witty suggestion — these are some of the qualities that 
made Chaucer's poetry acceptable to the audience for which he 
wrote. He never ventured on dangerous ground. He kept as far 
as possible from disagreeable realities. We search in vain for the 
most covert allusion to the painful events of the time. Devas- 
tating pestilences, disaster abroad, discontent and insurrection at 
home — he took for granted that his audience did not care to hear 
about such things, and he passed such things by. They wished to 
be entertained, and he entertained them charmingly, with lively 
adventures in high and human life, pictures of the life chivalric 
with its hunts and tournaments, pictures of the life vulgar with 
its intervals of riotous mirth, sweet love-tales, comical intrigues, 
graphic and humorous sketches of character. 

It would seem that Chaucer, like Shakespeare after him, was 
brought professionally face to face with the people whose sym- 
pathies he wished to command, and thus, like Mr Gladstone's 
orator, drew from his audience in a vapour what he gave back 
to them in a shower. Seven years after his return from imprison- 
ment in France, he received a life pension of twenty marks for 
good service done the king as a '' valettus," and in the year fol- 
lowing he appears in the Exchequer Rolls as an Esquire of the 



6 GEOFFREY CHAUCER I 

Household. Unfortunately the Household Book of Edward HI. 
has not been recovered, so that we cannot know directly what 
Chaucer's official duties were. But Mr Furnivall has examined 
the book in which Edward IV. 's domestic system is set forth, with 
a word of compliment to Edward HI. as " the first setter of 
certainties among his domestical meyne," and it appears there 
that the Esquires of Household " were accustomed, winter and 
summer, in afternoons and evenings, to draw to Lords' chambers 
within Court, there to keep honest company after their cunning, in 
talking of chronicles of kings and of others policies, or harping, 
singing, or other acts martials, to help to occupy the Court and 
accompany strangers till the time of their departing." This, then, 
was probably the practice when Chaucer served the king, and it 
was one of his official duties to make the time pass pleasantly for 
the king's visitors. He could, if he liked, instead of harping or 
singing, or talking history or politics, try the effect of his own 
verses on an audience not likely to submit to boredom. At the 
time when Chaucer passed into manhood, in the seventh decade 
of his century, there was a remarkable concurrence of circum- 
stances favourable to the development of an English poet. Given 
a man of poetic genius within the circle of the Court, the time 
had come if the man was there : he could hardly escape such a 
conspiracy of influences to stimulate and foster his gift. Poetry 
was recognized as one of the graces of a courtly life ; the queen 
was interested in the art, and had French metricians about her, 
Froissart among the number : the king also was an emulous patron, 
and besides was anxious, along with all his Court, for a poet who 
should do honour to the language which had at last established 
itself as the language of the whole nation. The opportunity was 
there ; the call was urgent. Chaucer was able to respond. The 
hour had come, and the man as well. 

Chaucer continued to rise steadily in royal favour, and in the 
prime of his life was frequently employed in important diplomatic 
missions — a sufficient testimony to his powers of making himself 
agreeable. Up to 1386, fortune would seem to have been uni- 
formly kind to him. Among other places, he had an opportunity 
of visiting Italy while Petrarch was still alive and Boccaccio was 
in the height of his fame. In 1372 he was appointed one of the 
commissioners for arranging a commercial treaty with the Genoese, 
and visited Florence and Genoa in the following year. Unless 
royal favourites were then intrusted with very unsuitable posts, 
our poet must have had a decidedly commercial turn. In 1374 
he was appointed Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidy of 
Wools, Skins, and Tanned Hides in the Port of London ; and he 
had to perform his duties in person, without the option of a dep- 
uty. In his " House of Fame," perhaps with a reference to these 



HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. 7 

duties, he speaks of going home when his reckonings were made 
up and poring over books till his eyes were dazed ; and doubtless, 
between business and poetry, he must have been closely occupied. 
For several generations before Chaucer's time, the successful poets 
of France had been in the habit of receiving munificent presents, 
which enabled them to give their whole time to poetry. Chaucer 
was not so fortunate, or unfortunate ; his patron, instead of handing 
over to him jewels, horses, houses, or lands, obtained a moderate 
pension for him from the Crown, and the privilege of discharging 
the dry duties of a moderately lucrative office — an arrangement 
which may, perhaps, be considered peculiarly English, and which 
probably combined a certain amount of leisure with a solid feeling 
of independence. Besides his pension and his salary, he seems 
to have had an allowance for robes as one of the king's esquires ; 
and he received the custody of a wealthy minor, which brought 
him something equivalent to about ^{^looo of our money. The 
accession of Richard II. (1377) did not injure his position: his 
pension was confirmed, and he received, besides, another annuity 
of twenty marks, in lieu of a daily pitcher of wine. The Issue 
Rolls contain further entries of money paid to him for his expenses 
abroad on the king's service. In 1382 he was appointed Comp- 
troller of the Petty Customs of the Port of London, with the 
privilege of appointing a deputy. In 1385 he was allowed to 
name a deputy for his other comptrollership. In 1386 he sat in 
Parliament as a Knight of the Shire of Kent. This was the zenith 
of his fortunes. In that year John of Gaunt lost his authority 
at Court. A commission was issued for inquiring, among other 
alleged abuses, into the state of the subsidies and customs, and 
Chaucer was superseded in his two comptrollerships. The new 
brooms had probably little difficulty in finding an excuse for sweep- 
ing away the protege of the fallen Minister. As is often the manner 
of poets, he had saved little of his pensions and salaries as a royal 
favourite and a public officer ; if, at least, we may draw the natural 
inference from his two years afterwards getting both his annuities 
transferred to another man. The revival of John of Gaunt's influ- 
ence in 1389 again brightened his prospects. He was appointed 
Clerk of the King's Works. In 1394 he obtained an annuity of 
;2^20 ; but the decay of his fortunes is too plainly indicated by the 
fact that he was several times under the necessity of applying for 
small portions of this pension in advance. It is pleasing, however, 
to know that the last year of his life was made happy by the acces- 
sion of his patron's son, Henry Bolingbroke, who immediately 
more than doubled his annuity by the additional grant of forty 
marks. He would seem to have retired to a tenement in the gar- 
den of the chapel of the Blessed Mary, of Westminster. Accord- 
ing to the inscription on his tomb in Westminster Abbey, confirmed 



8 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 

by the cessation of the minutes of his pension, he died on the 25th 
October 1400. 

These main facts in Chaucer's Hfe are drawn from official rec- 
ords. While they leave the imagination room enough to picture 
the poet's life at Court, they mark the outlines of that life with 
sufficient distinctness. We must be careful about filling in details 
of his inner history from supposed autobiographical references in 
his poems. Chaucer's biographers too often take the poet literally, 
ignoring his ironic humour and his conventional artistic pretences. 
They argue from one or two jests at his wife's expense, of a kind 
that might be made by the most affectionate of husbands, provided 
there was no real ground for them, that his wife was a shrew and 
his married life far from happy. They accept as matter of fact 
to be gravely discussed the poet's statement in the opening of the 
* Book of the Duchess,' which serves happily as part of the artistic 
setting of that poem, that he has been unable to sleep night or 
day for eight years. This confession of a long and hopeless love- 
passion is taken with such unhesitating faith, that it is set against 
and allowed to overbear otherwise plain documentary evidence of 
the date of Chaucer's marriage to one of the " damoiselles " of the 
Queen's Chamber. But why take such conventional artistic pre- 
tences literally? In the beautiful Prologue to the ' Legend of 
Good Women ' the poet tells us that on the first of May he hied 
him to the fields before sunrise to see the daisy unclose, and that 
he spent the whole day leaning on his elbow and side, 

" For nothing elles, and I shall not lie, 
But for to look upon the daisy." 

The scent and colour of the flowery meadow were so sweet that the 
poet thought he could live in it the whole month of May, 

" Withouten sleep, vvithouten meat or drink." 

Are we to take this pretty fancy literally, as a modern imitator 
of the mediaeval poets is said to have done ? Extravagant love- 
sorrows, fantastically transcending poor human nature's powers of 
endurance, were equally a commonplace of the school in which 
Chaucer wrote. 

What was the personal appearance of this soldier, scholar, 
courtier, poet, man of business, and successful wooer of a queen's 
maid of honour? The portrait procured by Occleve ^ represents 
him probably after his retirement to St Mary's, and with the 
monastic dress and gesture of a grave teacher in dark gown and 
hood, pointing with the forefinger of the right hand, holding 

[1 See a photograph of it in Mr Furnivall's ' Trial-Forewords,' Chaucer Society^ 



HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. 9 

a string of beads in his left, and having an inkhorn danghng at 
his breast. The eyes are large and grave, and the features regular, 
and small in proportion to the size of the head. In the description 
of himself in the ' Canterbury Tales,' put into the mouth of the 
imperious host {Fro/, to "Sir Thopas"), he probably was in- 
dulging his favourite habit of ironical bantering. The small size 
of the waist is certainly jocular, seeing that the host is described 
as a large burgess. The mysterious elfish reserve, and attitude of 
quiet listening, are in keeping with his position as the observer 
and recorder of his companions ; and the thing is no more trust- 
worthy as a veritable portrait of Chaucer than the reserved 
"Spectator" as a sober description of Addison. 

Knowing that Chaucer was a successful courtier, we look in his 
works for the necessary qualifications. In the contrast between 
Placebo and Justinus in the Merchant's Tale, we see that he had 
theorised on the conditions of success at Court. Justinus, as his 
name partially implies, was outspoken and honest, churlish and 
cynical towards human frailties : the sort of man that succeeds 
only when his services are indispensable, or his eccentricities 
amusing. But Placebo was a true courtier, who understood the 
courtier's golden rule of never obtruding advice : he was wise 
enough to agree with his superior's plans, and so evade dangerous 
responsibilities — 

" For, brother mine, of me take this motif : 
I have now been a court-man all my life, 
And, God it wot, though I unworthy be, 
I have standen in full great degree 
Abouten lordes of full high estate ; 
Yet had I never with none of them debate. 
I never them contraried truely 
I wot well that my lord can more than I, 
What that he saith I hold it firm and stable ; 
I say the same or elles thing semblable. 
A full great fool is any counsellor 
That serveth any lord of high honour 
That dare presume or ones thinken it 
That his counsel should pass his lordes wit." 

Admirers of sturdy English independence — independence that 
is more candid in the exposure of faults than in the acknowledg- 
ment of merits, will desire always to think of Chaucer as having 
been more of the Justinus than the Placebo. Perhaps he was a 
judicious mean between the two — neither a churl nor a sycophant. 
At any rate, it is worth noticing that he understood the arts of the 
courtier if he cared to avail himself of his knowledge. One thing 
could hardly have failed to be of service to him in his diplomatic 
negotiations, and that was equability of temper. There is every 
indication in his works that he was not an eager, excitable man ; 



10 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 

moody and uncertain. On the contrary, he would seem to have 
been tranquil and leisurely, with his wits in easy command ; 
patient, not self-assertive, yet with sufficient backbone to defy 
Fortune when the worst came to the worst. Such, at least, he 
appears in his works, and such, from his diplomatic success, we 
may presume him to have been in actual business ; though we 
should err greatly if in every case we concluded that the diplom- 
atist with the pen has equanimity enough to be diplomatic with 
the tongue. In his works, at least, he displays the most artful 
and even-tempered courtesy. We see him with easy smile defer- 
entially protesting ignorance of the flowers of rhetoric ; throwing 
the blame of disagreeable things in his story on some author that 
he professes to follow ; dismissing knotty inquisitions as too diffi- 
cult for his humble wit ; evading tedious or irrelevant narrations 
by referring the reader to Homer, or " Dares," or " Dyte." He 
conducts us through his narratives with facile eloquence, smooth- 
ing over what is unpalatable, waving aside digressions, interspers- 
ing easy reflections ; never staying too long upon one topic. If 
he had equally ready command of his resources for the purpose 
of keeping people in good-humour face to face with himself, no 
wonder though the king found him useful in embassies. Perhaps 
the best evidence of his equable unhurried ways is his patient fol- 
lowing of the windings and turnings of the protracted subtlety of 
Pandarus in mediating between Troilus and Cresside. This is 
the unique gift of the epic poet and of the novelist : it is their 
special function, with due precautions against tediousness, to ex- 
hibit operations that are too subtle or too extended for the stage. 
Contrast this engineering of Pandarus with the wooing of Anne 
by Richard III. ; the deception of Othello by lago ; the fooling 
of Ajax by Ulysses. These are all triumphs of active audacity as 
distinguished from patient intrigue : they are examples of working 
upon the feelings no less perfectly adapted for stage effect than 
the calculations of Pandarus are for subtle epic. And as these 
cases illustrate the distinction between what is suited for the 
different species of composition, so I believe they illustrate a 
distinction in the characters of the authors. Coleridge, generalis- 
ing as usual from himself, has said that all great men are calm and 
self-possessed, and that " Shakespeare's evenness and sweetness of 
temper were proverbial even among his contemporaries." There 
is, perhaps, more truth in the generalisation than there is in the 
professed statement of fact, though both are open to considerable 
limitations and explanations. There is no record of evenness of 
temper as a characteristic of Shakespeare ; and although there 
were, one would be inclined to think, from the evidence of his life 
and works, that while he may have been even-tempered as com- 
pared with Marlowe and Ben Jonson, he was a much more excita- 



HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. I I 

ble man than Chaucer. I doubt very much whether Shakespeare 
had the easy equable self-possession of Chaucer : with all his 
fundamental tranquillity and clear grasp, there was more fire in 
him — more of a tendency to take daring liberties, and to mock 
danger with cool assurance. I do not suppose that Shakespeare 
could have practised the cruelty of Richard III. any more than 
Chaucer could have undertaken the service that Pandarus ren- 
dered to Troilus ; but I believe that Shakespeare was capable of 
the cool daring requisite in the one case, while Chaucer had the 
easy equanimity requisite in the other. 

How about Chaucer's qualifications for winning the heart of a 
queen's maid of honour? His works show that he was not hkely 
to fail in the respectfulness that women are said to love. He is 
on all occasions the champion of " gentle women, gentle creatures " ; 
and, however much sly fun he makes of their foibles, he makes 
ample compensation in praises of their beauty, their constancy, 
their self-sacrifice. M. Sandras could not have made a greater mis- 
take than when he said that Chaucer imitated the chivalrous Guil- 
laume de Lorris out of deference to the taste of the Court, and 
had naturally more affinity of spirit with the satirical Jean de Meun. 
There was nothing monkish in Chaucer's spirit. Gower bears a 
message from Venus to Chaucer, in which she greets him as her own 
disciple and poet, with whose glad songs the land is fulfilled over 
all, and to whom she is especially beholden. And Chaucer himself 
more than once expresses his devotedness to the Queen of Love, 
and claims credit for meritorious service. In middle life he seems 
to have sobered down into becoming gravity, translating Boethius 
on the Consolations of Philosophy, and writing a Treatise on the 
Astrolabe for his little son Lewis — no less fitting as an employment 
for grave years than significant as an indication of his substantial 
strength of intellect. But all his best work as a poet was done at 
the instigation of love and humour, and his humour was not mo- 
nastic. It is remarkable that, while both his serious and his comic 
productions are founded in most cases on pre-existing works of 
art, in the serious pieces he follows his original much more closely 
than in the comic. In his comic tales, as Tyrwhitt says, " he is 
generally satisfied with borrowing a slight hint of his subject, which 
he varies, enlarges, and embellishes at pleasure, and gives the whole 
the air and colour of an original." His imagination dwelt by pref- 
erence in the regions of brightness, sweetness, softness, and laugh- 
ter, in its broadest as well as its sublest varieties. He passed 
lightly over his opportunities of sublime description ; he picked 
small personal threads out of the mighty web of public transactions. 
Such grandeur as appears in his pages is the grandeur of magnifi- 
cent buildings, splendid pageants, assemblies, and processions of 
knights and ladies in gorgeous array. Affairs of the heart in high 



12 GEOFFREY CHAUCER: 

and humble life are his themes ; he is the sympathetic poet of the 
aspirations, sorrows, and manifold ludicrous complications of the 
tender passion. And though there is a strong serious strand in the 
thread of Chaucer's life, coming more into prominence as the soft 
outer nap is worn off by the rubs of time, his youthful poetry con- 
tains an immense preponderance of the gay over the grave. He 
was not a mere butterfly ; but, on the whole, he preferred the sun 
to the shade. 

Therein he showed his natural affinity for the Court. In the 
' Canterbury Tales ' it is the Monk that bores the merry pilgrims 
with his humdrum tragedies ; and it is the Knight that interposes 
to put a stop to him. The Knight does not like to hear of sudden 
falls from great wealth and ease ; tales of prosperous elevation are 
more to his liking. It is the grave professional men that tell the 
piteous tales : the Man of Law recites the sufferings of faithful 
Constance, the Clerk the trials of ])atient Griselda, the Doctor of 
Physic the heartrending fate of Virginia. These things do not 
occur by accident; there is a studied epic propriety in them. 
Chaucer evidently had his theory concerning what pertained to 
the Court, and what went naturally with the hard mental work of 
the learned professions. Looking back upon his own life, we see 
that his mixed career had given him experience of both, and that 
in his youth he inclined more to the one, while in his old age, as 
was natural, he felt drawn more towards the other. 

When we look closely at the construction of his poems, trying to 
realise how they were built up in the poet's mind, we are com- 
firmed in our first impressions of the equability of his proceedings. 
We are not to suppose that he sang as the birds sing without 
effort — out of "the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature," as 
Coleridge says. His work is too solid for that. Those perfect 
touches of character in the Prologue to the ' Canterbury Tales ' 
were not put together with unpremeditated flow : we should as 
soon believe that a picture of Hogarth's was dashed off at a sitting. 
And, indeed, Chaucer tells us himself, in his " House of P^ame," 
that he wrote love-songs till his head ached, and pored over books 
till his eyes had a dazed look. Still, he worked equably, with 
patient elaboration. He is not carried away into incontinent fine 
frenzies of creation ; his words and images do not flash together 
with lightning energy like the words and images of Shakespeare. 
His imagination is not overpowered by excited fecundity. Perhaps 
none of our poets combine such wealth of imagination with such 
perfect command over its resources : such power of expressing the 
incident or feeling in hand, with such ease in passing from it when 
it has received its just proportion ; perhaps none of them can put 
so much into the mouth of a personage, and at the same time 
observe such orderly clearness, and such propriety of character. 



HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. I3 

If you wish to understand his processes of construction, you cannot 
do better than study such passages as the elaborate self-dis- 
closure of Januarius, when he consults with his friends about the 
expediency of marrying, or the imprudent candour of the Pardoner, 
or the talk between Chanticleer and Pertelot in the tale of the 
" Nun's Priest." We are there struck by another consideration, 
and that is, how much he must have owed to his predecessors the 
garrulous inventive Fableors of northern France ; and with what 
clearness of eye, and freedom and firmness of hand, he gathered, 
sifted, and recombined their opulent details of action and char- 
acter. The ' Canterbury Tales ' could no more have grown out of 
the imagination and observation of one man than the ' Iliad,' 
although one man had scope for the highest genius in adding to, 
taking from, kneading, and wholly recasting the materials furnished 
by many less distinguished labourers. 

It were a nice question to raise, whether Chaucer or Shake- 
speare had the best knowledge of men. They exhibit character 
under conditions so very different that it is hard to make a satis- 
factory comparison. The epic poet has a choice between describ- 
ing his personages directly, accumulating characteristic traits in a 
full portrait, and making his personages reveal themselves, as it 
were, unconsciously in what they say and do ; and usually he 
supplements the one method by the other. He can put before 
us at his leisure their whole outward personality, voice, colour, 
general build, tricks of gesture, peculiarities of dress. We are 
left in no doubt as to his ideal ; and are in a position to say at 
once whether the details are consistent or inconsistent ; complete 
or meagre. Now, the dramatic poet is much more limited. He 
may introduce a striking feature now and then, such as FalstafPs 
fatness, Bardolph's red nose, Aguecheek's flaxen hair ; but for the 
most part, he must leave the outward personality, with all its 
suggestiveness, to the " make up " of the actor. Hence, so far 
are we from seeing easily the consistency or inconsistency of a 
dramatist's creations, that his intention not unfrequently becomes 
a subject of dispute — the situation within the compass of a play 
rarely being sufficiently varied to make the exhibition of character 
unequivocal. Unless, indeed, the personages either describe 
themselves, or are described by one another, or (as in Greek trag- 
edy) are known to the audience beforehand, their characters must 
always be more or less enigmatical, seeing that every action is 
open to several interpretations. It can never, therefore, be quite 
satisfactory to compare a dramatist, as regards knowledge of char- 
acter, with an epic poet, and that, too, an epic poet whose pecu- 
liar province is the epic of manners and character. Although 
Shakespeare's personages are not all so definitely, fully, and con- 
sistently characterised as Chaucer's, we must not conclude that 



14 GEOFFREY CHAUCER ! 

his knowledge was inferior. In the case of such masters, one 
might do worse than follow the commonplace advice to study, 
enjoy, and admire both, without troubling one's head about their 
respective merits. It is enough for us to know that Chaucer 
observed with clear eye the characteristic features and habits of 
the different classes in the England of his time, and has set them 
down for us with the most patient elaboration and the most genial 
spirit. 

In trying to make out Chaucer's character from his poetry, we 
can never be quite certain that we do not carry our notions of 
his equability, not to mention his inborn kindly joyousness, a 
great deal too far. The gay predominates in his works over the 
grave. They seldom turn to the gloomy side of things. Yet 
the more intimately we know him, the more we begin to form 
suspicions that, after all, his equanimity is only comparative, and 
that perfection in this is as difficult to be attained as in any other 
virtue. We see him chiefly in his flower-garden and summer- 
house ; but beneath his gay manner as he receives visitors there, 
we discover, after longer acquaintance, symptoms of sensitive 
tenderness as well as sternness and strength where the smiling 
serenity at first appeared to be imperturbable. 

Chaucer's works are assigned by Professor Ten Brink to three 
periods : the first ending with his departure for Italy in 1372, 
comprising his " A B C," his translation of the Roman de la Rose, 
and his " Book of the Duchess," and representing his subordina- 
tion to French influence ; the second, ending in 1384, the supposed 
date of the " House of Fame," comprising, as well as that work, 
his " Life of St Cecile " (Second Nun's Tale), his '• Parliament of 
Fowls," his "Troilus and Cresside," and his first version of the 
Knight's Tale, and representing his subordination to Italian influ- 
ence ; and the third, comprising " Annelida and Arcite," the 
"Legend of Good Women," the 'Canterbury Tales,' and the 
"Complaint of Mars and Venus," and representing Chaucer's 
maturity and independence. I should be inclined to reject this 
division as throwing a factitious, and, upon the whole, misleading 
light on the natural development of Chaucer's genius. There is 
a certain advance from the " Book of the Duchess " to the " House 
of Fame " ; but I do not think that that advance is explained by 
supposing French influence to have operated on the one, and 
Italian influence on the other. The difference mainly represents 
an increasing width of knowledge and mastery of expression, fully 
accounted for by the interval between the works. It seems to me 
that Chaucer had from first to last more affinity with the French 
than with the Italians. I can distinguish no change either in his 
methods or in his spirit that is fairly attributable to Italian in- 



HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. 1 5 

fluence. He was master of his own development from the time 
that he received his first impulse from the French. The Italians 
merely supplied him as they supplied Shakespeare with material. 
English obligations to Italian impulse belong to the sixteenth 
century. The greater part of " Troilus and Cresside " is Chaucer's 
own.^ He exalts the character of Cresside in the chivalrous spirit 
common to him and Guillaume de Lorris ; and recasts Pandarus 
with a power of characterisation inferior to nothing in the ' Can- 
terbury Tales.' 

Mr Furnivall's refinement of a fourth period, a period of decay, 
into which he puts all the minor poems that he does not Hke, 
seems purely arbitrary, so far as I can judge ; but Mr Furnivall's 
devotion to the subject gives him a very great authority. I should 
have been disposed to refer Chaucer's " Flee fro the Press " to his 
final retirement from the world, to the sam.e date as his " Parson's 
Tale." 

The "Testament of Love," the " Assembly of Ladies," and the 
" Lamentation of Mary Magdalene," are now universally allowed 
not to be genuine works of Chaucer ; and of late, the genuine- 
ness of the " Court of Love," the " Flower and the Leaf," and 
" Chaucer's Dream," has been disputed by Professor Ten Brink 
and Mr Bradshaw, and their arguments have been accepted by 
Mr Furnivall. In a previous edition of this book I showed that 
the arguments then adduced against the genuineness of the 
" Court of Love " were inconclusive. The case has since then 
been strengthened by Mr Skeat and Mr Furnivall, who also con- 
tend that the extant translation of the Roma7i de la Rose is not 
Chaucer's. Textual criticism on such a point is entitled to every 
respect, and they have also in their favour the fact that in the 
unique MSS. of these works no author's name is given. The 
grammar differs in important and obvious particulars from Chau- 
cer's, and the works have been ascribed to him on conjecture. 
The case against genuineness is so strong, that Mr Skeat is par- 
donably impatient with those who do not at once own themselves 
convinced. Now I am not particularly concerned to stand up for 
the " Court of Love " as Chaucer's, for the simple reason that my 
business is with his character as a poet ; and it seems to me so 
thoroughly Chaucerian in spirit, that my impressions of the man 
would be the same whether it was written by him or not. In its 
curious mediaeval doctrine on the subject of love, it is in complete 
harmony with the Prologue to the ' Legend of Good Women,' 

1 See Mr W. M. Rossetti's admirable prefatory remarks to his comparison of 
the work with Boccaccio's Filostrato, Chaucer Society. I do not quite agree with 
Mr Rossetti, upon his own showing, that the chivalric passion and gallantry came 
in great measure out of Boccaccio's poem into Chaucer's. Troilus's courtship is 
modelled more, it seems to me, on the pursuit of the Rose. 



l6 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 

— Cupid's martyrology, the Lives of the Saints of Love. If not 
written by Chaucer, it must have been written by a very clever 
and observant imitator — one might even say, looking to small 
coincidences,^ a deliberate and dexterous forger. The great diffi- 
culty in the way of not assigning the " Court of Love " or the 
"Flower and the Leaf" to Chaucer is this, that between him and 
Surrey there is no English poem half so good, and that it is next 
to incredible that the name of any poet capable of such work 
should have perished. If Chaucer did not write it, who did? 
This, I take it, is the feeling of everybody who still thinks it 
possible that Chaucer may have been the author. That the 
grammatical differences, which are doubtless very striking, should 
have been introduced by a transcriber, seems to them more likely 
on the whole than that a nameless poet, in an age whose known 
poets never rise anywhere near such a level, should have produced 
works that have received enthusiastic admiration from such judges 
as Dryden and Mr Swinburne. Mr Skeat, although he has com- 
mitted himself to the opinion that the " Court of Love " is " utterly 
unlike Chaucer " — an opinion which is to me simply unintelligible 

— made the suggestion at one time that the author might be 
Sackville. But the age of the MS. makes this impossible by 
a generation at least, and there is no other likely claimant 
among the poets that are known to us. When a possible claimant 
is discovered, nobody will have a word to say for Chaucer's 
authorship of the doubtful poems, and in the meantime Mr Skeat 
and Mr Furnivall deserve thanks for their thorough examination 
of the text. 

It is an interesting fact that Chaucer did not complete the 
scheme of the ' Canterbury Tales ' or of the ' Legend of Good 
Women,' and that he left half finished "The story of Cambuscan 
bold." This looks as if his manifold other occupations indisposed 
him to long-sustained efforts. The incompleteness of the Squire's 
Tale is particularly interesting. One is inclined to conjecture 
that he may have thought of it as the beginning of a larger enter- 
prise, a cycle of stories like the Carlovingian or the Arthurian, 
with Cambuscan as the central figure. It would have been a 
worthy enterprise for the last of the Trouveres. The old cycles of 

1 Philogenet, the name of the writer of the " Court of Love," comes curiously 
near Philo Ghent, which Chaucer might well subscribe himself; and Philobone 
would pass for a pretty transmutation of Philippa, the name of Chaucer's wife. 
True, Philobone is not Philogenet's mistress — she only introduces him; but this 
is in accordance with the Troubadour rule (which may explain, also, the apparent 
inconsistency of" Chaucer's Dream "), that, when the poet's mistress was attached 
to a court, he addressed his songs to the presiding princess (see Mr Rutherford's 
Troubad'ours, p, 150). Rosial, though intended for Philippa, may thus have 
been formally Lady Blanche, on whom Philippa attended. Once more, compare 
the name Rosial with 11. 41-48 of the Romance, where the translator tells his 
patroness that she " ought of price and right be cleped J\^ose of every wight." 



HIS LANGUAGE, METRES, AND IMAGERY. 1/ 

romance were hackneyed, worn out ; otherwise one might wonder 
that the great poet of EngHsh chivahy never dealt with the 
legend of Arthur. His predecessors had exhausted every great 
name known to their histories. But Genghis Khan, whose fame 
filled Europe in the fourteenth century, was a new and tempting 
hero ; and the far East was an untrodden field for the romancer. 
Cambuscan might well have been the centre of a new romantic 
cycle. Hence it strikes one as possible that Chaucer stopped 
short with the Squire's Tale because he had larger views, and 
put off completing it as he put off completing the full scheme of 
the ' Legend ' and the ' Canterbury Tales,' because he shrank from 
long continuance of high-strung labour. 



H. — His Language, Metres, and Imagery. 

Our philological authorities do not seem to be quite at one 
about Chaucer's English. Mr Earle (' English Philology,' pp. 75- 
97) says that Chaucer and Gower wrote King's English, the 
language that had grown up at Court about the person of the 
monarch ; and that this was distinguished from all the contem- 
porary dialects by its being formed more under the influence of 
French. This position is not refuted by counting the number of 
words derived from the French, as Mr Ellis does for the Prologue 
to the ' Canterbury Tales,' and finding that the proportion of 
words so derived is " not quite one word in a line on an average." 
It is not so much the number of words borrowed that Mr Earle 
insists upon, as the general strain or rhythm of the language. 
Not that he means to say that the King's English adopted the 
French rhythm, but that, growing up as it did among persons 
familiar with French,, it acquired a rhythm of its own, different 
both from the French rhythm and from the rhythm of the pro- 
vincial dialects. To understand this, compare the English of 
Chaucer or Gower with the English of Robert de Brunne, or of 
Langland's ' Piers Plowman.-' Difference in the inflections and 
in the proportion of French words do not account for the im- 
mense indescribable difference in the general movement of the 
language. This movement, this rhythm, Mr Earle considers the 
distinctive feature of the King's English. 

Whether .Dr Morris would accept Mr Earle's position or not, I 
do not know. Dr Morris lays down that Chaucer wrote in the 
East Midland dialect, and so far is at variance with Mr Earle's 
statement, that the language of the Court differed from all other 
dialects. But perhaps Dr Morris means only that Chaucer uses 
the inflectional system of the East Midland as distinguished from 
the Northern and the Southern. These dialects have been defined 



1 8 GEOFFREY CHAUCER I 

by Dr Morris with new precision.^ The Midland was the most 
widely spread, and of its many varieties the East Midland was the 
most important. It was first cultivated as a literary dialect as 
early as the beginning of the thirteenth century ; and it had then 
thrown off most of the older inflections, so as to become in respect 
of inflectional forms and syntactical structure as simple as our 
own. It was the dialect of Orm and of Robert of Brunne. 
Wycliffe and Gower added considerably to its importance, and 
Chaucer's influence raised it to the position of the standard 
language. In Chaucer's time it was the language of the metro- 
polis, and had probably found its way south of the Thames into 
Kent and Surrey. Such is Dr Morris's account of the East Mid- 
land. So far as appears, he has not been struck with differences 
of rhythm, and it has not occurred to him whether the language 
of the Court was different in other respects than inflections from 
the language of the metropolis. The probabilities seem to be over- 
whelming in support of Mr Earle's hypothesis, and justify him in 
saying that the facts admit of no other explanation. The frequent- 
ers of the Court, when they were ultimately forced to adopt the 
language of the people, could not but have found it poorly equipped 
for the varied needs of polite conversation ; and even when they 
were not under the necessity of importing words from the more 
cultivated French, must have been compelled to introduce turns 
of expression to the extent of altering the complexion of the 
language. 

Whatever may be our conclusion as to the sources of Chaucer's 
language, there can be little doubt that his genius made it the 
standard language. A poet cannot, of course, invent a language : 
what he writes must be intelligible to his readers, and his admirers 
are constrained by the same necessity of being intelligible to their 
readers. But if a great poet had arisen before Chaucer in the 
Northern dialect, or if Chaucer himself had written in that dialect, 
the course of the English language might have been substantially 
altered?} In corroboration of this, Mr Earle remarks that " the 
Tuscan form of modern Italian was decided by the poetry of 
Dante, at a time when Florence and Tuscany lay in comparative 
obscurity, and when more apparent influence was exercised by 
Venice, or Naples, or Sicily." I suspect, however, that in all 
such cases the poet must be backed by a cultivated society ; and 
that the only possibility likely to have affected the course of 
standard English would have been the existence of a high culture 
in the Court of Scotland, and the ascendancy of a great poet there 
before the date of Chaucer. 

1 Garnett and Guest, however, are still worth reading. 



HIS LANGUAGE, METRES, AND IMAGERY. I9 

One of the many directions of thorough antiquarian study in 
this century has been towards the remains of old EngHsh ; and 
one of the most valuable triumphs of this patient scholarship has 
been to restore the versification of Chaucer. Chaucer's metre 
had been a vexed question ever since he had been reduced to 
print. The change of pronunciation had seriously affected the 
number of syllables in his verses ; and his editors, Thynne and 
Speght, while they valiantly abused detractors, could not, or at 
least did not, show how to supply the missing syllables. Ascham, 
Sidney, Spenser, and others of that age, recorded their admiration 
of the old poet ; but they omitted to say on what principles they 
scanned his lines. A century later, Dryden, with his vigorous 
habit of saying what he could not as well as what he could admit, 
expressed the greatest veneration for Chaucer, but considered that 
the rough diamond needed smoothing for modern senses. He laid 
down in the most positive manner that Chaucer's lines often have 
a syllable too many, and often a syllable too few. His peremp- 
tory opinion received a considerable shake from the publication 
of Tyrwhitt's edition in 1778, with its "Essay on the Language 
and Versiiication of Chaucer"; but even then a certain amount 
of scepticism might have been pardonable. One might have been 
forgiven for entertaining some doubts about Tyrwhitt's liberal 
restoration of final es, to make up for the deficiency of feet when 
the text is pronounced with the modern allowance of syllables. 
Tyrwhitt did not apply sufficiently convincing scholarship to show 
that these es were " survivals " of French and old English (or 
Anglo-Saxon) terminations, and, still more largely, of old English 
inflections. This was first thoroughly done by Guest, who pointed 
out that the dropping of the final e is the exception, and expressed 
a hope that we should one day have a list of all the words in 
which Chaucer has taken that liberty. I am not aware that the 
more recent labours of Mr Ellis, Mr Skeat, and Mr Furnivall, 
have realised this hope, but they have gone a considerable way 
towards its fulfilment. The general reader should see the sections 
added to Tyrwhitt's Essay by Mr Skeat, in the Aldine edition of 
Chaucer, vol. i. 

But not only have the missing syllables been recovered by 
modern scholarship : an attempt has been made by Mr Ellis, in 
his elaborate and ingenious work on Early English Pronunciation, 
to recover the sounds of the vowels, so that Chaucer may be de- 
claimed as he was by his contemporaries. Mr Ellis proceeds on 
the supposition that no two words were set down as rhymes 
unless their sounds agreed perfectly ; and he starts from known 
vowel-sounds of Latin, French, and English of the sixteenth cen- 
tury. The investigation is interesting, and the results are as 
trustworthy as the undertaking is courageous ; but nothing can 



20 GEOFFREY CHAUCER I 

restore for us the old music of Chaucer's verse. It is musical 
to us — exquisitely so — but the music is not the music that de- 
lighted the Court of Richard II. We may learn to repeat the 
articulations of his contemporaries, but we cannot hear with 
their ears. 

Chaucer has three principal metres : four-accent couplets (the 
metre of Milton's "Comus"), in the " Romance of the Rose," 
" Chaucer's Dream," the '' Book of the Duchess," and the " House 
of Fame" ; rhyme-royaP — the metre of Shakespeare's " Lucrece " 
— (a stanza of seven decasyllabics, with rhymes of i, 3 + 2, 4, 5 -f- 
6, 7), in the "Court of Love," the "Parliament of Birds," the 
"Flower and the Leaf," four of the 'Canterbury lales,' and 
"Troilus and Cresside " ; and heroic, or five-accent couplets, in 
the "Legend of Good Women*," and most of the 'Canterbury 
Tales.' 

The four-accent couplet is the original metre of the Roman de 
la Rose and nearly all of the French fabliaux, and was the most 
common metre in English poetry during the thirteenth and the 
fourteenth centuries. It is the prevailing form in Dr Morris's 
' Specimens of Early English,' being used for all kinds of narra- 
tive matter, fables, romances, tales, ' Sunday Sermons,' and politi- 
cal songs. Its facility is rather a temptation than a check to a 
loquacious narrator ; and Chaucer dances along in his jingling 
fetters with the greatest vivacity, as if his fertile invention 
wanted some severer restraint. He dashes off every now and 
then into digressive reflections, and recalls himself with an effort, 
as if he could hardly refrain from throwing in a few more of the 
facile couplets before he had done. 

"Troilus verse" was the favourite form of the fifteenth century, 
and was frequently used in the sixteenth. It was, indeed, the 
great stanza of English poetry, till Spenser superseded it with 
the fuller music of his more elaborate structure, and is a simpler 
and homelier dress corresponding with the youth of the Enghsh 
muse. It may be disputed in which of the two stanzas the greatest 
quantity of English poetry has been written ; for while Troilus 
verse was used by many poets of the lourteenth century whose 

1 " The epithet royal seems to be derived from the chant-roynl of the French, 
a short poem in ballet-stave, written in honour of God and the Virgin Marv ; and 
by which, according to French critics, the abilities of the king were tested in the 
poetical contests at Rouen." — Guest's English Rhythms, ii, 359. According to 
Warton, the title " Balad-Royal" was first used in English by Caxton, being applied 
to Herbert de Burgh's stanza in his Translation of Cato's Morals. Gascoigne calls 
the same stave " rythm-royal." It is sometimes said that the epithet " roval " was 
derived from the circumstance that the stave was used by James I. of Scotland in 
the ' King's Quhair' ; but this is probably a later supposition based only upon the 
coincidence. If it had been the tradition, James VI. of Scotland would hardly 
have applied the term " ballet-royal" to the stave of eight, designating the seven- 
line stave — after its first memorable appearance in English — Troilus verse. 



HIS LANGUAGE, METRES, AND IMAGERY. 21 

names even are seldom repeated now, the Spenserian was the 
favourite stanza of the great revival at the close of the eighteenth 
century, numbering among its patrons Shenstone, Thomson, and 
Beattie, Campbell, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Chaucer used 
the seven-line stanza to embody graceful allegories, and tales of 
sweet pathos. His choice of this medium for the touching stories 
of Constance and Griselda, and the woful legends of Cecilia and 
little Nicholas, is approved by the later employment of it in Spen- 
ser's " Ruins of Time," Daniel's " Complaint of Rosamond," and 
Shakespeare's " Lucrece " and " Lover's Complaint." It is worth 
noting that though Lydgate adopted the same stanza for his tragi- 
cal " Falls of Princes," Chaucer employs a heavier eight-line stanza 
for his Monk's "Tragedies," or brief commiserations of potentates 
that had fallen out of great prosperity. The seven-line stave with 
its single repeat and appended couplet, a form that lends itself 
naturally to the expression of graceful after- thought or irrepressible 
sob, is too quick a measure for the embodiment of statelier feeling. 
This was felt by Michael Drayton, when, after composing his poem 
on the wars of the Barons of Richard II. in Troilus verse, he recast 
the whole into heavier ottava ritna. But ottava rbna (the stanza 
of ' Don Juan'), though strong enough for the vigorous march of 
Drayton's narrative, would not have been sufficiently inwoven for 
the grave reflective sentiments of the Monk's Laments, which are 
written in eight banded lines (i, 3 -f 2, 4, 5, 7 + 6, 8) — the Spen- 
serian stanza without the concluding Alexandrine. 

Five-accent couplets are more suited for comedy and the comic 
epic, than for tragedy and the grand epic. This can be called 
" heroic verse " only when heroism is taken to imply a minimum 
of dignified feeling. There is, doubtless, a certain strenuousness 
in its movement when the matter is heavy ; it may be used to 
convey the impression of bold splendid energy : but dignity and 
statehness are out of the question. If the ear attends to the 
rhyme at all, the expectation of it must be more or less of a 
distraction from the feeling of massive grandeur. With the 
lighter material of comedy, the regular beat of the rhyme is 
cheerful and animating, if the couplet is occasionally divided and 
other means are used to prevent the regularity from becoming 
tedious. If one were disposed to venture on fine distinctions, 
one might say that the ottava rima of ' Anster Fair ' and ' Don 
Juan ' is the peculiarly appropriate metre of the light epic, while 
the couplet is the predestined vehicle of dramatic comedy. In 
the theatre the ear cannot wait for the close of a stanza through 
several verses without fatigue, and the quick recurrence of the 
rhyme is imperative. In a light narrative intended to be read, 
longer suspense is permissible, while at the same time the nature 
of the subject forbids intricacy ; and ottava rima, with its simple 



22 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 

even structure, seems to answer the purpose about as exactly as 
could be desired. 

Chaucer's similitudes are taken from such familiar sources, that 
M. Sandras charges him with giving a vulgar tone to his renderings 
of the chivalrous romances of Boccaccio. Whether it was that his 
English humour now and then broke out through his chivalrous sen- 
timent, or whatever may be the explanation, there certainly is some 
ground for the charge. The comparison of Cressida to the " chief 
letter A," is so Hke our modern vulgar "A i," that we are not per- 
haps unbiassed judges in that particular case. But there are a few 
similitudes in the Knight's Tale expressed with a primitive simpli- 
city that must have drawn a smile from the poet himself. Such is 
the comparison of Palamon and Arcite quarrelling about Emily to 
two dogs fighting for a bone, while a kite comes in and carries off 
the object of Contention. And still more amusing and unworthy 
of the subject is the comparison of poor humanity struggling on 
through the dark world with uncertain footing, to a drunk man, 
drunk as a mouse, who knows that he has a house, but does not 
know how to reach it, and finds the way very slippery. These 
similitudes are undeniably vivid : but unless our judgment is biassed 
by modern feelings, they belonged even in Chaucer's age more to 
the quaint monk than the chivalrous knight. 

[Most of Chaucer's similitudes, however — and he uses compara- 
tively few, either as extended similes or as metaphors — are simple 
without being quaint or humorously inadequate to the subject. 
In this respect he contented himself with commonplaces^ and made 
no effort to embellish his style with far-fetched flowers. \ He gives 
his warriors the look of griffins and lions, and makes them fight 
like cruel tigers and wild boars. Occasionally he expands the 
comparison, and gives it a certain local colour after the Italian 
manner, as when he introduces the Thracian hunter, or the tiger of 
the Galgopley, or the lion of Belmarie, or the pale face of the 
criminal on his way to execution. In extolling the charms of his 
heroines, he describes for the most part directly iljind when he 
wants a brief illumination, makes use of the immemorial compari- 
sons from the simple beauties of inanimate nature, the rose and 
thejily, sunlight and moonlight, spring-time and morning^ 

[We are accustomed to think that Chaucer was able to dispense 
with a richly loaded diction, because he wrote for a primitive 
audience, thankful for small poetical mercies. But they were not 
so unsophisticated that a poet could make a reputation for colour, 
or as they might have called it, flowers of rhetoric, " the blossoms 
fresh of Tullius' garden sweet," upon the strength of comparing 
lovely women to roses and lilies, sunshine and spring, perennial as 
is the charm in thinking of such a likeness. Chaucer might have 
had to bestir himself for less familiar " tropes " and figures, had it 



HIS LANGUAGE, METRES, AND IMAGERY. 23 

not been that the structure of his poems gave him the opportunity 
of flooding his pages with colour in direct description. Beautiful 
women, heroic men, gorgeous buildings, gay processions, splendid 
armour, gardens and fountains, woods and rivers, birds and beasts, 
come in his way as the poet of fables and allegories, love, char- 
acter, and romantic adventure ; and he describes them enthusiasti- 
cally with the utmost opulence of detail. His pictorial imagina- 
tion was not called upon for many fragmeiilary contributions, but 
every now and then it received steady employment. \Vliat need 
had his readers for isolated touches of colour when their poet gave 
them such accumulations to revel in as the Gardens of Venus, the 
Temple of Venus, the House of Fame, the Court of Love, the 
Tournament before Theseus, the rival troops of the knights and 
ladies of the Flower and the Leaf ? 

The " Parliament of Birds " is perhaps the richest of Chaucer's 
smaller poems — "imitations," as M. Sandras calls them, — but 
the " Book of the Duchess " is as good an example as need be of 
the poetical machinery that he inherited. The central aim of the 
poem is to commiserate the death of Blanche, Duchess of Lancas- 
ter, and to express the sorrow of her husband ; but this object has 
grown into fold after fold of richly coloured and animated concep- 
tion. The poet begins by telling how, for eight years, he has 
suffered from restlessness and sleeplessness, and how one night, as 
he lay awake, he called for an old romance (apparently Ovid's 
'Metamorphoses,' in the original or in a French translation), and 
read the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone. A less skilful artist might 
have explained to us that his tale of devotedness was a proper 
parallel to the mournful separation of united love, of which he was 
preparing a memorial. But though this was doubtless the real 
motive, the poet skilfully invents another, which makes it appear 
as if the correspondence were an accident, and varies the common- 
place of falling asleep over the introductory tale. The ostensible 
motive is that the story of Ceyx and Alcyone involves the agency 
of the god Morpheus, of whom the poet had never heard before. 
Partly in game, he vows to make Morpheus a present of a bed of 
down, if only he may obtain an evidence of his divinity. Scarcely 
had he breathed this vow when he fell asleep. 

Next comes the dream, the opening of which is exceedingly 
beautiful. 

" Me thought thus that it was May, 
And in the dawning I lay — 
Me mette ^ thus in my bed all naked — 
And looked forth, for I was waked 
"With smalle fowles a great heap, 
That had affrayed me out of my sleep, 
Through noise and sweetness of their song. 

1 Dreamed, 



24 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 

And, as me mette, they sat along 

Upon my chamber roof without, 

Upon the tiles over all about, 

And songen everych in his wise 

The mosie solemne servise 

By note that ever man, I trow. 

Had heard. For some of them song low, 

Some high, and all of one accord. 

To tellen shortly at oo word. 

Was never heard so sweet a steven^ 

But it had be a thing of heaven; 

So merry a song, so sweet entunes, 

That, certs, for the town of Tunis 

I nold - but I had heard them sing : 

For all my chamber gan to ring 

Through singing of their harmony; 

For instrument nor melody 

Was nowhere heard yet half so sweet, 

Nor of accord yet half so meet. 

For there was none of them that feigned 

To sing, for each of them him pained 

To find out merry crafty notes. 

They ne spared not their throats." 

Then the decorations of his chamber are described, and how, as 
he lay admiring the bird concert and the bright beams streaming 
through the painted window, he heard a htmter try his horn, and 
footsteps of men, horses, and homids, and confused talk of hunting. 
He got up, and rode to the forest, finding out by the way that the 
hunter was the Emperor Octavian. By-and-by the hounds are at 
fault, and as the poet is loitering about, an incident happens that 
conducts to the main subject of the poem. 

" I was go walked fro my tree, 
And as I went, there came by me 
A whelp that fav^^ned me as I stood, 
That had y-followed and could no good : 
It came and crept to me as low 
Right as it hadde me y-know; 
Held down his head and joined his ears 
And laid all smoothe down his hairs. 
I would have caught it, and anon 
It fledde, and was fro me gone. 
And I him followed, and it forth went 
Down by a flowery greene went^ 
Full thick of grass, full soft and sweet, 
With flovveres fel* fair under feet, 
And little used, it seemed thus ; 
For both Flora and Zephyrus, 
They two that maken flowres grow 
Had made their dwelling there I trow 
For it was on to behold 

1 Sound, 2 Ne would. ^ path. 4 Many, 



THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 25 

As though the earth envye wold 

To be gayer than the heaven, 

To have more flovvres suche seven ^ 

As in the welkin starres be. 

It had forgot the poverty 

That winter through his colde morrows 

Had made it suffer ; and his sorrows — 

All was forgotten, and that was seen, 

For all the wood was waxen green : 

Sweetness of dew had made it wax." 

While looking at the beasts that were roaming through the wood, 
more in number than Argus could have counted, he became aware 
of a knight in black, sitting with his back against a huge oak-tree. 
This knight is supposed to represent the mourning Duke of Lan- 
caster ; and thus, through the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, and the 
various scenes and incidents of the May morning, we reach the 
main subject of the poem. 



III. — The Chief Qualities of his Poetry. 

It is not unlikely that our impressions of the chief quahties of 
Chaucer's poetry are different in some respects from those felt by 
his contemporaries. In all probability we pass lightly over many 
things that fascinated them, and admire many things that they 
received with comparative indifference. Their captivating novel- 
ties have become our commonplaces, their impressive reflections 
have become trite ; and, on the other hand, many passages that 
would doubtless have seemed tame, and commonplace to them, 
strike us with all the freshness of reawakened nature, or with the 
strange interest of things exhumed after long ages of burial. 

We cannot recover, with any assurance of certainty, the feelings 
of Richard II.'s courtiers when first they were charmed by the 
English language in the compositions of a great poet. We cannot 
imagine how his descriptions of fair women, fine buildings, flowers, 
trees, and bird-singing, were heard or read by those familiar with 
the " Romance of the Rose " ; nor how his ' Canterbury Tales ' 
affected minds that knew such plots and incidents by the hundred. 
We know what a master of language can do with the most familiar 
materials ; we know how fervently Chaucer's power was acknow- 
ledged, not only among his~ countrymen, but also on the other 
side of the Channel : but how they felt his power, which of its 
elements appealed to them most irresistibly, must ever remain 
matter for speculation. 

Archaisms of word and inflection cannot but be inseparable 
elements in the sum total of the effects of Chaucer's poetry on 

1 Seven such, seven times as many. 



26 GEOFFREY CHAUCER ! 

US. Single words have changed their associations very materially 
since the days of Chaucer; and there are many that signify 
nothing to the present generation, many that are empty sounds, 
whose meaning may be attained only by dim approximation 
through glossarial synonyms. Words faintly picked up from a 
glossary have not the same power as the words of our mother- 
tongue. Even if we have a literary familiarity with them, the 
matter is not altogether mended. In all cases we may be sure 
that a passage with obsolete words in it does not move us as it 
moved contemporary readers. What may have been the effect of 
the passage when its words were hung about with the associations 
of the time, we cannot reahse either by patient study or impatient 
flash of imagination : it is a dead thing, that no intellectual 
alchemy can resuscitate. We only know that it must have been 
different from what we experience. A phrase in a modern poem, 
even, does not go with equal power to the heart of every reader. 
Chance associations are fruitful sources of colouring peculiar to 
the individual. But to none of us can an obsolete word of 
Chaucer's have the same associations that it bore to men in 
whose mouths and ears it was a familiar visitor. 

The natural effect of archaisms on pathetic passages is to make 
them sweeter and simpler by making them more childlike. Such 

lines as — 

"The newe green, of jolif ver the prime 
And sweete smelling flovveres white and red; " 

or — 

" And as I could this freshe flower I grette, 
Kneeling alway, till it unclosed was 
Upon the smalle, softe, sweete grass, 
That was with floweres sweet embroided all " — 

come to us like the prattle of childhood, and fill us with the 
freshness of spring as no modern words could do. Even lines 
that are not so appropriate in the infantile mouth, are made 
prettier by their archaic garb. Take the following : — 

" She was not brown ne dun of hue, 
But white as snow y-fallen new. 
Her nose was wrought at point devise, 
For it was gentle and tretis, 
With eyen glad and browes bent; 
Her hair down to her heeles went, 
And she was simple as dove of tree; 
Full debonaire of heart was she." 

These lines, particularly the two about the lady's nose, are such 
as a modern reader would apply to a beautiful pet ; they probably 
carried a more elevated sentiment when first written. 



THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 2/ 

Look now at a passage that, apart from the quaintness of the 
language, should carry the sense of splendour — the march of 
Theseus upon Thebes. 

" The red statue of Mars with spear and targe 
So shineth in his white banner large, 
That all the fieldes glitteren up and doun : 
And by his banner borne was his pennoun 
Of gold full rich, in which there was y-beat 
The Minotaur which that he wan in Crete. 
Thus rid this duke, thus rid this conquerour. 
And in his host of chivalry the flower, 
Till that he came to Thebes and alight 
Fair in a field there as he thought to fight." 

The archaic inflections and turn of language give this a quaint 
unction, as if it were the imperfect utterance of an astonished 
child. The influence of the diction co-operates largely in re- 
minding us that the splendour is a thing of bygone times, strange 
and wonderful in our imaginations. In the following astrological 
passage, matter and manner go together in the same way. It is 
the reflection of the " Man of Law " on the infatuated passion of 
the Soldan for Constance. 

** Paraventure, in thilke large book 
Which that men clepe the Heaven, y-written was 
With starres, when that he his birthe took, 
That he for love should have his death, alas ! 
For in the starres, clearer than is glass, 
Is written, God wot, whoso could it read 
The death of every man withouten dread. 

In starres many a winter there beforn 
Was written the death of Hector, Achilles, 
Of Pompey, Julius, ere they were born; 
The strife of Thebes, and of Hercules, 
Of Sampson, Turnus, and of Socrates 
The death; but mennes wittes been so dull 
That no wight can well read it at the full." 

Later on in the same tale, there is another astrological passage 
— an impassioned appeal to the starry destinies — when Constance 
is setting sail for the East to the marriage that proves so fatal. 

" O firste moving cruel firmament ! 
With thy diurnal swough that crowdest aye 
And hurlest all fro East to Occident 
That naturally would hold another way ! 
Thy crowding set the heaven in such array 
At the beginning of this fierce voyage. 
That cruel Mars hath slain this marriage." 



28 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 

In this passage the archaic trappings, and particularly the bit 
of dogma about the natural course of the firmament, are rather 
in the way — interfering with our perception of the dignity and 
passion of the apostrophe. 

The archaic diction makes itself felt with peculiar harmony in 
the narrative of supernatural manifestations, such as were ascribed 
to devils and magicians. Sir Walter Scott might have envied the 
following account of the ritual of Arcite in the temple of Mars, 
and the answer to his prayer : — 

" The prayer stint of Arcita the strong: 
The ringes on the temple door that hong, 
And eke the doores clattereden full fast, 
Of which Arcita somewhat him aghast. 
The lires brende up on the altar bright 
That it gan all the temple for to light; 
A sweete smell anon the ground up gave 
And Arcita anon his hand up have, 
And more incense into the fire he cast, 
With other rites mo, and at the last 
The statue of Mars began his hauberk ring, 
And with that sound he heard a murmuring 
Full low and dim, and said thus, ' Victory ! ' " 

This is a more active and instantaneously impressive sorcery than 
the calm power of the stars, and the archaisms seem to go with 
it in readier harmony. 

Take now another point. Chaucer sympathises deeply with 
the victims of deceitful love, and assails false lovers with cordial 
anger. If he were a dreamy poet like Spenser — a poet whose 
indignation assumed a wailful and regretful tone — the antique 
words and turns would be in perfect unison ; they would help to 
translate the objects of our pity and anger farther and farther 
away from the living world — farther and farther back into a dim 
distance from indignant tears and frowns. But Chaucer is the 
opposite of a dreamy poet ; his feelings are fresh and quick, his 
expression direct and demonstrative ; he pities Dido, Ariadne, 
Phyllis, Medea, and flames out with fierce passion against yEneas, 
Theseus, Demophon, and Jason, as heartily as if they had all been 
his personal acquaintances. . He cannot think of the treachery of 
the false lovers without getting into a passion. 

" But welaway ! the harm, the ruth. 
That hath betide for such untruth ! 
As men may oft in bookes read, 
And all day see it yet in deed, 
That for to thinken it a teen is." 

He utterly repudiates the pretence of ^neas that he was urged 
to leave Carthage by a destiny that he could not disobey ; he treats 



THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 29 

this with scorn as a shallow and commonplace excuse for leaving 
a love that had become stale. He travels beyond his authorities 
to imagine the complainings of the forsaken queen ; refers his 
readers for the whole of the touching story to Ovid ; and cries 
with sudden energy — 

" And were it not too long to endite. 
By God, I would it here write ! " 

He is no less furious at Theseus — 

" How false eke was Duke Theseus, 
That as the story telleth us, 
How he betrayed Adriane; 
The Devil be his soules bane ! " 

Demophon, the son of Theseus, wicked son of a wicked sire, 
prone to deceit as the young of the fox, is treated with con- 
temptuous scorn for his treachery to Phyllis — 

" Me list not vouchesafe on him to swink, 
Dispenden on him a penful of ink, 
For false he -was in love right as his sire ; 
The Devil set their soules both on fire ! " 

Jason is held up to especial contempt ; the poet proceeds to 
impeach him with especial zest — 

"Thou root of false lovers, Duke Jason ! 
Thou sly devourer and confusion 
Of gentle women, gentle creatures ! " 

Now there is no mistaking the genuineness of all this passion. 
But can we echo all these imprecations with true fervour? Do 
they not sound strange in our ears? Can we feel them as the 
poet's contemporaries did? 

It was the opinion of De Quincey that, in the quality of anima- 
tion, Chaucer is superior to Homer. The comparison is not, 
perhaps, altogether fair, because Chaucer's themes, as a rule, 
admit of lighter treatment than Homer's : but certainly no poet 
could well be more animated than Chaucer. All his works are 
full of bright colour, fresh feeling, and rapid ease and gaiety of 
movement. There is no tedious dulness in his descriptions ; no 
lingering in the march of his narrative. With all his loquacity 
and vivacity, he knows when his readers have had enough of one 
thing, and passes easily on to something else. The ease of his 
transitions is very remarkable. Some writers drive so hard at the 



30 GEOFFREY CHAUCER .' 

expression of what lies before them for the moment, that they 
cannot recover themselves quickly enough to make a graceful turn 
to what succeeds : they throw themselves off the track, and become 
confused and uncertain in their apprehension of the main subject. 
This Chaucer never seems to do ; he always keeps his main subject 
clearly and firmly in view ; and his well-marked digressions add 
to the general animation, by dispersing the feeling of rigid re- 
straint without tending in the slightest to produce confusion. 

It is in the Knight's Tale and the Squire's Tale, which deal to 
some extent with martial subjects, that Chaucer may most fairly 
be compared with Homer. The comparison is not unfavourable 
to our native poet. Even in conveying a vivid impression of the 
stir of an excited crowd, in which Homer is so excelling, we 
cannot allow that Chaucer is inferior. What could be more ani- 
mated than Chaucer's account in the Squire's Tale of the bustUng 
and buzzing multitude that assembled to stare at the magic horse, 
broad mirror of glass, and ring of gold, and to exchange specula- 
tions concerning the nature of these wonderful presents? Take, 
again, the gathering to the tournament before Theseus, in the 
Knight's Tale. What could be more inspiring, more alive with 
bright movement, splendid evolution, and fresh air than this? 
The herald has just proclaimed that the more deadly weapons are 
excluded from the lists ; whereupon — 

" The voice of the people toucheth heaven, 
So loude criede they with merry Steven : 
' God save such a lord that is so good : 
He willeth no destruction of blood ! ' 
Up goth the trumpes and the melody. 
And to the listes ride the company 
By ordinance through the city large, 
Hanging with cloth of gold and not with serge. 
Full like a lord this noble Duke can ride ; 
These Two Thebanes upon either side: 
And after rode the Queen, and Emily, 
And of ladies another company, 
And of communes after their degree. 
And thus they passeden through that city, 
And to the listes comen they by time. 
It was not of the day yet fully prime, 
When sette was Theseus rich and high, 
Hippolyta the Queen, and Emily, 
And other ladies in their degrees about. 
Unto the seates presseth all the rout; 
And westeward, thorough the gates of Mart, 
Arcite, and eke the hundred of his part, 
With banners red is entered right anon; 
And in that selve moment Palamon 
Is under Venus, eastward in that place, 
With banner white, and hardy cheer and face." 



THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 3 1 

We should expect the courtier of Richard II., even when writing 
in his old age, to be more animated in his treatment of love than 
the blind old man of the rocky isle. And such he is. We shall 
see that Chaucer specially excels in depicting the tender aspects 
of the passion, but he was a master also of its cheering inspira- 
tions. Everybody has by heart his cheerful description of the 
youthful squire. That gay gentleman, however, was basking in 
the unbroken sunshine of love ; you must take one who has 
known its dark eclipse, if you wish to see an example of its full 
power. Take Arcita of the Knight's Tale, who has been changed 
by his passion out of all recognition : he has become lean, hollow- 
eyed, and sallow, and his spirits have been so low that the sound 
of music brought tears into his eyes. Consider the change 
wrought on this woful lover when he has made some progress 
towards success, and his youthful energies return to their natural 
tone. Take him when he walks out of a May morning with his 
rising hopes, and drinks in the sympathy of nature, which also is 
rejoicing in its recovery from darkness and winter. 

" The busy larke, messenger of day, 
Salueth in her song the morrow gray; 
And fiery Phoebus riseth up so bright 
That all the orient laugheth of the light, 
And with his streames dryeth in the greves 
The silver droppes, hanging on the leaves. 
And Arcita, that is in the court royal 
"With Theseus, his squier principal, 
Is risen, and looketh on the merry day. 
And for to doon his observance to May, 
Remembering of the point of his desire. 
He on his courser, starting as the fire, 
Is ridden into the fieldes him to play. 
Out of the court, were it a mile or tway. 
And to the grove, of which that I you told, 
By aventure his way he gan to hold, 
To maken him a garland of the greves. 
Were it of woodebind or hawthorn leaves, 
And loud he sung against the sunne sheen : — 
* May, with all thy flowres and thy green, 
Welcome be thou, faire freshe May ! 
I hope that I some greene getten may.' 
And fro his courser, with a lusty heart, 
Into the grove full lustily he start. 
And in a path he roamed up and down." 

When we go for a feast of tender feeling to a poet possessing in 
large measure the quality of animation, we should not go in a 
languid mood. We need not, of course, follow his lead ; we may 
choose our own pace. Instead of going with the surface of the 
lively brook, and seeing no more of its pebbles and the beauties of 



32 GEOFFREY CHAUCER ! 

its banks and winding nooks than the rapid glance that its speed 
allows, we may fix on delicious spots, and feed there to our heart's 
content. It is this quality of animation that makes Chaucer so 
peculiarly the poet of outdoor summer weather, the most delight- 
ful of companions on the hillside, or by the running streams. 

Chaucer's heart fitted him well to be the poet of tender senti- 
ment. He seems to have dealt with fond observation on every- 
thing that was bright and pretty, from " the smalle fowles that 
sleepen all the night with open eye," to the little herd-grooms 
playing on their pipes of green corn. He watched the little 
conies at their play, the little squirrels at their sylvan feasts ; 
he looked into the " colde welle streames, nothing dead," to 
admire 

"The smalle fishes bright 
With finnes red, and scales silver white." 

He knew, too, the colour of every feather in Chanticleer, and had 
minutely studied his majesty's habits towards his subjects. But 
of all things of beauty in nature, the singing-birds were his most 
especial favourites. He often dwells on the ravishing sweetness of 
their melodies. His finest picture of their exuberance of joy in the 
spring — their tuneful defiance of the fowler, their billing and 
chirruping, their vows of eternal fidelity — occurs in the opening of 
the " Legend of Good Women." 

A man of the world himself, Chaucer still could enter into 
simple love-making among unsophisticated gentle creatures of a 
larger growth than the amorous little birds. Perhaps no passage 
shows the poet's exquisite tenderness better than the wooing of 
Thisbe by Pyramus, so well known in its ludicrous aspects from 
the caricature in " Midsummer Night's Dream " ; and it is but an 
act of justice to these two faithful lovers to let them be seen as 
they were conceived by a sympathetic poet. 

"This wall, which that betwix them bothe stood 
Was cloven atwo, right fro the top adoun, 
Of olde time, of his foundatioun. 
But yet this clift was so narrow and lite 

But what is that that love cannot espy? 
Ye lovers two, if that I shall not lie, 
Ye founden first this little narrow clift ! 
And with a sound as soft as any shrift, 
They let their wordes through the clifte pace, 
And tolden while they stooden in the place, 
All their complaint of love and all their woe. 
At every time when they durste so, 
Upon the one side of the wall stood he, 
And on that other side stood Thisbe, 



THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. ,33 

The sweete sound of other to receive. 
And thus their wardens woulde they deceive, 
And every day this wall they woulde threat, 
And wish to God that it were down y-beat. 

Thus would they sayn : — ' Alas, thou wicked wall ! 
Through thine envyii thou us lettest all ! 
"Why nilt thou cleave, or fallen all atwo? 
Or at the leaste, but thou wouldest so, 
Yet wouldest thou but ones let us meet, 
Or ones that we mighte kissen sweet, 
Then were we covered of our cares cold. 
But natheless, yet l)e we to thee hold 
In as much as thou sufferest for to gone 
Our wordes through thy lime and eke thy stone. 
Yet oughte we with thee been well apaid.' 

And when these idle wordes weren said, 
The colde wall they woulde kissen of stone, 
And take their leave, and forth they woulde gone." 

Thoroughly as his heart seems to go with this simple, earnest 
passion, almost infantile in its fondness, he can strike many 
another key in the infinitely varied art of love. Especially is he 
skilled in the chivalrous profession of entire submission to his 
lady's will, and humble adoration of her pre-eminent excellence. 
Take, for example, the opening stave of his humble prayer to Pity, 
which, without doubt, the cruel fair was at liberty to apply to 
herself. 

*' Humblest of heart, highest of reverence, 
Benigne flower, corown of virtues alle ! 
Sheweth unto your royal excellence, 
Your servant, if I durste me so calle, 
His mortal harm, in which he is y-falle, 
And not all only for his evil fare. 
But for your renown, as I shall declare. 



What needeth to shoM' parcel of my pain, 
Sith every wo that hearte may bethink, 
I suffer; and yet I dare not to you plain, 
For well I wot, although I wake or wink, 
Ye recke not whether I float or sink. 
Yet natheless my truth I shall susteen. 
Unto my death, and that shall well be seen." 

All forlorn lovers have his best services at their command. We 
may apply to him his own favourite line, many times repeated — 

*' For pity runneth soon in gentle heart." 

How feelingly he depicts the situation of Palamon — imprisoned 
and love-sick Palamon ! 



34 GEOFFREY CHAUCER I 

" In darkness and horrible and strong prison 
This seven year hath sitten Palamon, 
Forpined, what for wo and for distress. 
Who feeleth double sorrow and heaviness 
But Palamon? that love distraineth so, 
That wood out of his wit he goth for wo." 

The woful pangs of sweet Aurelius too, his languor and furious 
torments, are followed with deep sympathy ; and the heart-broken 
agony of forsaken Troilus is most intimately realised. In the ex- 
pression of " deep heart's-sorrowing," Chaucer's words always flow 
with peculiar richness and intimate aptness of choice. 

Naturally, however, it is womanhood in distress that enters his 
heart with the keenest stroke. He might well plead before the 
god and goddess of love that, if he had laughed at some of the 
foibles of the sex, he had not been indifferent to their virtues and 
their sufferings. His gallery of distressed heroines was as wide 
as the range of legend and history that was known to him : Con- 
stance, Griselda, Virginia, Cecilia, Alcyone, Alcestis, Cleopatra, 
Thisbe, Dido, Hypsipyle, Medea, Lucrece, Ariadne, Philomela, 
Phyllis, Hypermnestra. The thought of their suffering agitates 
him, destroys his composure ; he cannot proceed without stopping 
to express his compassion, or to appeal to heaven againSt the 
caprice of Fortune or the wickedness of men. But he never 
dwells long on such scenes. It was not for him to harrow the 
feelings of his audience ; when he has said enough to move them, 
he at once proceeds to effect a diversion. Lingering agonies were 
not to his taste. His representative the Host is almost choked 
with emotion at the Doctor's tale of Appius and Virginia ; he 
relieves himself with furious denunciation of Appius, and tries to 
laugh the painful theme out of his memory. The legends of Con- 
stance (Man of Law's Tale) and Griselda (Clerk's Tale), have the 
happy termination of comedy ; and the story of their prolonged 
sufferings is relieved by many a passing word of indignant blame 
against the guilty causes of their misery. Mediaeval readers liked 
long-drawn martyrdoms, but in the hands of such an artist as 
Chaucer, whether he dealt with the martyrs of religion or the mar- 
tyrs of love, the pathos is never hard and overbearing ; our pity is 
kept quick and fresh, and not allowed to stagnate in oppressive 
anguish. Such a poem as Wordsworth's ' Margaret ' was impos- 
sible for him. 

One of the most delightful of the ' Canterbury Tales ' is the 
Franklin's Tale. The incorruptible fidelity of the beautiful Dori- 
gen, the equanimity and magnanimity of her brave husband 
Arviragus, the resolution of the Squire Aurelius not to be outdone 
in generosity by the Knight, capped by the resolution of the 
Knight not to be outdone by the Squire, make this tale a unique 



^HE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 35 

embodiment of the highest ideals of chivalry : scrupulous adher- 
ence to a rash promise on the one hand being met by renunciation 
of unfair advantage on the other. The chivalry of the tale is 
fantastic, but the poet's art makes it credible and beautiful. 

Chaucer's humour is the most universally patent and easily 
recognised of his gifts. The smile or laugh that he raises, by 
refined irony or by broad rough jest and incident, is conspicu- 
ously genial. Mephistophelian mockery and Satanic grimness are 
not in his way. This had nothing to do with his being the bright 
morning star of English poetry — writing with the buoyancy of 
youth at a time when the struggle for existence was less fierce, 
when there was no bitter feeling between high and low, no en- 
venomed warfare of civil or religious party. There never has 
been age nor country in which the fierce spirit has wanted fuel for 
its fierceness. It was simply the nature of the man to be genial, 
— "attempered and soft" as the climate of his gardens of Venus. 
He would have been so in whatever age he had lived. 

The great criterion of good-nature, the indispensable basis of 
humour, is the power of making or sustaining a jest at one's own 
expense ; and none of our humorists bear this test so well as 
Chaucer. He often harps on his own supposed imperfections, his 
ignorance of love, his want of rhetorical skill, his poverty. His 
poverty, real or pretended — and, unfortunately, it would seem to 
have been real — is the subject of several jokes in his poems, as it 
must have been in his private talk. In the " House of Fame," 
when describing how the walls, roofs, and floors of the temple 
were plated with gold half a foot thick " as fine as ducat of 
Venice," he cannot resist the temptation to add — 

" Of which too little in my pouch is." 

His "Complaint to his Purse" is conceived in a very gay 
spirit : — 

" Now voucheth safe this day, ere it be night, 
That I of you the blissful sound may hear, 
Or see your colour like the sunne bright, 
That of yellowness hadde never peer. 
Ye be my life ! ye be mine heartes steer ! 
Queen of comfort and goode company ! 
Beth heavy again or elles mote I die." 

We must know this hobby of his to understand the full comic 
force of his comparing Alison to a newly forged noble, bright 
from the mint. 

The freedom of his humour, as one would expect, was pro- 
gressive. There are unequivocal touches of humour both in 



36 GEOFFREY CHAUCER I 

" Chaucer's Dream " and in the " Court of Love " ; witness the sly 
treatment of Morpheus, and the poet's timid entry into the sacred 
court ; but the humour, as became the subjects, is lurking and 
subordinate. It is worth noting, that in the " Court of Love," 
though he could not profess entire ignorance of the passion as he 
did so often afterwards, he professes to have kept out of the ser- 
vice of Venus for a most unconscionable length of time ; he was 
actually eighteen before he went to her court, and then he had to 
be summoned. But the humour is much less overt in the " Court 
of Love," than in the more mature " House of Fame." In that 
poem, as in the ' Canterbury Tales,' he treats his own personality 
with reckless contempt. When the poet is caught up, at first 
he loses consciousness ; but by-and-by the eagle wakes him up 
with comical remonstrances at his timidity. Half reassured, he 
begins to wonder vaguely what all this can mean : — 

" O God, thought I, that madest kind, 
Shall I none other wayes die? 
Whe'r Joves will me stellify, 
Or what thing may this signify? 
I neither am Enoch, ne Eli, 
Ne Romulus, ne Ganymede, 
That was y-bore up, as men read, 
To heaven with Dan Jupiter, 
And made the goddes botteler ! 
Lo, this was then my fantasy ! 
But he that bare me gan espy, 
That I so thought, and saide this — 
' Thou deemest of thyself amiss; 
For Joves is not thereabout, 
I dare will put thee out of doubt, 
To make of thee as yet a star.' " 

The comparison between his own stout person and Ganymede, 
and the implied conception of himself as the butler^ of the gods, 
are delicious. But, indeed, the passage throughout is so rich, 
that it is difficult to say which is its most comical touch. 

The outcome of his broad humour is seen in the general plan of 
the ' Canterbury Tales ' as much as in some of the pronounced 
particulars. With the rougher sort of the pilgrims, and as we 
shall presently see, only with them, the pilgrimage is a tipsy revel, 
a hilarious holiday " outing." They are the merriest company 
that mine "Host of the Tabard" has had under his roof for 
many a day ; and they are such jolly noisy good fellows that, at 
supper overnight, the host is tempted to propose that he should 
go with them and direct their merriment on the way. In the 

1 This, however, is one of those cases where Time has lent an additional touch 
to the humour. The butler was a higher functionary than we should understand 
now by the name, 



THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 37 

energy of his good-fellowship and confident sudden prospect of a 
hilarious journey, he cries for immediate decision on his plan — 

" Now by my father's soule that is dead, 
But ye be merry, smiteth off mine head. 
Hold up your hands withouten more speech." 

They agree ; and the idea thus conceived is carried out with no less 
spirit. The pilgrims must have made a sensation as they rode out 
of town. The more respectable members of the company doubtless 
bore themselves with becoming gravity, but the wilder spirits put 
no restraint upon their mirth. The Miller brought them out of 
town to the music of his bagpipes — and a bagpipe in the hands of 
a drunk man is an instrument likely to attract some attention. 
The harum-scarum pimpled-faced bacchanalian Summoner had 
put on his head a garland large enough for an alehouse sign, and 
flourished a cake as a buckler. His friend and compeer the Par- 
doner had, " for jollity," trussed up his hood in his wallet, and let 
his yellow flaxen hair hang in disorder on his shoulders, saying that 
it was the new fashion. 

" Full loud he sang ' Come hither, love, to me.' 
This Summoner bare to him a stiff burdoun, 
Was never trump of half so great a soun." 

A company with spirits so uproarious in it tasked all the Host's 
powers of maintaining order, authoritative though he was. Of 
course they broke through. The Knight, who drew the lot for 
teUing the first tale, was allowed to finish it ; but as soon as he had 
done, the drunk Miller struck in and insisted on telling a noble 
tale that he knew. Though hardly able to keep his seat, he was 
not so drunk as not to know that he was drunk ; he knew that, he 
said, "by his soun," and he besought them, if he said anything out 
of place, to lay the blame on the ale of Southwark. His tale does 
ample justice to his inspiration. The Host having once let the 
reins out of his hands was not able to resume them : the president 
of such a company must keep his authority by giving his subjects 
liberty to take their own way. The butt of the Miller's Tale was 
a carpenter ; and the Reeve being a carpenter thought himself 
aggrieved, and wanted to return the compliment by telling an 
equally coarse tale about the cuckolding of a miller. The Host, 
with the true instinct of a ruler, at once humoured him, and 
asserted his own dignity by cutting short his prologue, and com- 
manding him to tell his tale. Then the gross Cook, chuckhng 
over the discomfiture of the Miller, wanted to tell " a little jape 
that fell in our city," and the judicious Host granted permission. 
There was more intoxicated personality, wrangling, and peace- 



38 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 

making, as they went on. The Friar enraged the Summoner by 
relating an awkward adventure that happened to one of his pro- 
fession ; and the Summoner gave a merciless Roland for his Oliver. 
After a long draught of ale, the Pardoner recklessly exposed all the 
tricks of his trade, and had the audacious assurance, after this full 
confession of his roguery, to try to work upon the feelings of his 
brother pilgrims, and extract money from them. It is to be feared, 
too, that the Host required a little too much of the '' corny ale " to flj 
drown his pity for poor Virginia : one cannot otherwise account 
for his getting into a hot quarrel with the Pardoner, which required 
the intervention of the Knight to smooth it over. Towards the 
close of the pilgrimage the Cook showed symptoms of being over- 
come with sleep and ale, and seemed to be in danger of falling 
from his horse. The Host rebuked him, and the Manciple fell out 
upon him with such a torrent of abuse, that poor Robin over- 
balanced himself and tumbled to the ground in a furious futile 
effort to articulate a reply, and there was much shoving to and fro 
before they could set him in the saddle again. A pretty pilgrimage 
to the shrine of a saint ! There is endless food for deep animal 
laughter in the humours of these riotous pilgrims — particularly that 
madcap pair of ecclesiastics — the Summoner and the Pardoner. 
One is constantly finding fresh points of comical view in that 
precious couple. It is a mistake, I may remark, to look in the 
* Canterbury Tales ' for satire. If there is any, it is there by failure 
and imperfection ; it is a flaw in the poet's design, which was to 
provide material for disinterested laughter, zealous and profound. ! 
To suppose that there is any satire in the candid revelation of the 
Pardoner's gross deceptions of the credulous vulgar, is to fail to 
rise to tlie height of the humour of that great character. There is 
no more ill-nature in the elaboration of his reckless freaks, than in 
the often-quoted and justly-praised delicate irony of the opening 
of the Wife of Bath's Tale.^ ( 

As regards any lurking satirical purpose in the ' Canterbury 
Tales,' if we suppose that we discern any such purpose, we may 
take for granted that we are still on the outside of their riotous 
humour. It is true that a good many of the pilgrims are men of 
somewhat damaged reputation, or, at least, doubtful virtue. The 
Merchant is not beyond suspicion ; the Miller steals corn ; the 
Reeve has secured a comfortable feathering for his own nest ; the 
Cook is a profligate sot ; all the ecclesiastics, Monk, Friar, and 
Pardoner, exhibit a wide difference between their practice and 

1 If M. Sandras liad understood English humour, which seems to baffle 
Frenchmen as Scotch " wut " baffles Englishmen, he would hardly have said that 
in the 'Canterbury Tales' Chaucer's natural affinity with the spirit of Jean de 
Meun is made conspicuous. In the following section I shall show how Chaucer 
maintains his agreement with the spirit of chivalry. 



HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 39 

their doctrine ; and even the respectable professional men, the 
Lawyer and the Doctor, have a questionable liking for large fees. 
But these failings are not dwelt upon from the point of view of the 
satirist. With all their sinful taints, the pilgrims are represented 
as being on the whole jovial companions, satisfied with themselves 
and with each other ; the taints, indeed, are not shown in the 
aspect of sins, but rather in the aspect of ludicrous peccadilloes or 
foibles. The sinners are elevated by the hilarity of the occasion 
above the sense of sin ; and the poet does not hold them up to 
scorn or contempt, but enters genially into the spirit of their holi- 
day revel. He does not join them to backbite and draw out their 
weaknesses for the bitter amusement or sharp dislike of his readers : 
he joins them to enjoy their company. Chaucer's humour in the 
' Canterbury Tales ' is not in the spirit of Jean de Meun ; it comes 
much nearer the spirit of Burns in the " Jolly Beggars." 

IV. — His Delineation of Character. 

It is somewhat startling to put together, as I have done in the 
preceding section, the buffoonery that went on throughout the 
Canterbury pilgrimage. We remember the tales of high chivalrous 
sentiment and exquisite pathos, and we ask how these were com- 
patible with such noisy ribaldry. The explanation is, that the 
tales are suited to the characters and manners of the different 
pilgrims ; and that while one set of them indulge largely in ale and 
inebriated freaks and loud animal mirth, the more respectable sort 
preserve a becoming dignity. 

To a certain extent Professor Lowell is right in saying that there 
is no caste feeling among Chaucer's pilgrims. Knight and yeo- 
man, monk and cook, lodge all night in the same inn, set out in a 
company on the same errand, and contribute to a common enter- 
tainment subject to the direction of one man, and that an inn- 
keeper. But we should greatly misunderstand the delicacy of 
Chaucer's sense of manners as well as of character, if we went away 
with the impression that in the ' Canterbury Tales' there is no 
trace of the distinctions of rank, and that in the pilgrimage there 
is no respect paid to persons. 

In the Prologue, the poet begs pardon for not setting the pilgrims 
in their degree — 



'&' 



" Also I pray you to forgive it me 
All have I not set folk in their degree 
Here in this tale, as that they shoulde stand. 
My wit is short, ye may well understand." 

He had a livelier plan in view than to make them tell off their 
tales in the order of their rank. But though he did not adopt 



40 GEOFFREY CHAUCER I 

this palpable and unmistakable way of indicating caste, he does 
really show respect of persons in several less gross and obvious 
ways. A line is drawn, though unobtrusively and with delicate 
suggested art, between " the gentles " and the other pilgrims. 
If this had not been done, we should have been compelled to 
say that our poet had inaccurately portrayed the life of the time. 
But he has done it, and done it not by harsh angular forced 
assertion, but easily and naturally in his clear-sighted shaping 
and working out of his materials. The careful reader gets the 
clue from such passages as that at the end of the Knight's Tale, 
where we are told that the whole company, young and old, praised 
it as a noble and memorable story, " and namely," that is, partic- 
ularly, " the gentles every one." That was the sort of tale that 
the gentles felt themselves at hberty to approve of. When the 
Pardoner took up with animation the Host's request that he 
should tell a merry tale, forthwith the '' gentles " began to cry 
that they must have no ribaldry: ''Tell us," they said, "some 
moral thing that we may learn." It is very misleading to apolo- 
gise, as some writers on Chaucer do, for the gross obscenity of 
certain of the tales, on the ground that this was the outspoken 
fashion of the time — that decorum then permitted greater freedom 
of language. The savour of particular words may have changed 
since the time of Chaucer ; but then, as now, people with any 
pretensions to refinement were bound to abstain strictly in the 
presence of ladies from all ribaldry of speech and manner, on pain 
of being classed with '' churls " and " villains." In the " Court of 
Love," the gentle lover is warned emphatically that he must not be 

" Ribald in speech, or out of measure pass, 
Thy bound exceeding; think on tiiis ahvay : 
For women been of tender lieartes aye." 

And in the ' Canterbury Tales,' Chaucer carefully guards himself 
against being supposed to be ignorant of this law. The ribald 
tales are introduced as the humours of the lower orders, persons 
ignorant or defiant of the rules of refined society, and moreover, 
as we have seen, excited, intoxicated, out for a pilgrimage as 
riotous and wild as our pilgrimage to the Derby. ^ Such riotous 

1 That the behaviour of the more uproarious of Chaucer's pilgrims was based 
on real life we may see from one Thorpe's indignant account of the actual pil- 
grimages to the shrine of St. Thomas (cjuoted in Morley's English Writers, ii. 291) : 
"They will ordain with them before to have with them both men and women that 
can sing wanton songs, and some other pilgrims will have with them bagpipes; so 
that every town they come through, what with the noise of their singing, and 
with the sound of their piping, and with the jangling of their Canterbury bells, 
and with the barking out of dogs after them, that they make more noise than if 
the king came there away with all his clarions and many other minstrels. And 
if these men and women be a month in their pilgrimage, many of them shall 
be a half-year after great janglers, tale-tellers, and liars." In saying that in 



HIS DELINEATION OP CHARACTER. 4I 

mirth was very far indeed from being the fashion of the time 
among fashionable people. Mark how careful Chaucer is to shield 
himself from the responsibility of it. In the Prologue (1. 725), he 
prays his readers of their courtesy not to set down his plainness of 
speech as his "villany": he is bound to record faithfully every 
word that was said, though it had been said by his own brother. 
He does, indeed, whether seriously or jocularly, allege the example 
of Christ and Plato as authorities for plainness of speech ; but he 
does not repeat this when he returns to the matter before the first 
of his freespoken tales. In the prologue to the Miller's Tale, he 
is most explicit. He says that the obstinate Miller would not 
forbear for any man, " but told his churlish tale in his manner." 
And then he makes this clear and elaborate apology for rehears- 
ing it, — 

" And, therefore, every gentle wight I pray, 

For, Goddes love, deemeth not that I say 

Of evil intent; but for I must rehearse 

Their tales all, be they better or worse, 

Or ell'es falsen some of my matter. 

And, therefore, whoso list it not to hear, 

Turn over the leaf and chose another tale; 

For he shall find enovve great and small, 

Of storial thing that toticheth gentilesse, 

And eke morality and holiness. 

Blameth not me, if that ye chose amiss. 

The Miller is a chtirl, ye knozv well this , 

So 7vas the Reeve and other many mo, 

And harlotry they tolden bothe two. 

Aviseth you, and put me out of blame; 

And eke men shall not maken earnest of game." 

Observe, accordingly, how the tales are distributed. Nothing 
ribald is put into the mouth of the gentles, and nothing ribald is 
told concerning their order. The " very perfect gentle knight," 
who never said any villany to any manner of man, recites the 
tale of Palamon and Arcite, with its chivalrous love and rivalry, 
its sense of high womanly beauty, its gorgeous descriptions of 
temple, ritual, procession, and tournament. His son, the gallant, 
well-mannered, well-dressed squire, embroidered like a mead, with 
his head full of love, romance, song, and music, gives a fragment 
of a romance about King Cambuscan and his daughter Canace, 
and the wonderful exploits of a magic horse, a magic mirror, and 
a magic ring. The professional men — the busy lawyer, the studious 
clerk, the irreligious but good-hearted doctor — give the pathetic 

Chaucer's company "each fellow-traveller carried his wit for bagpipe," Pro- 
fessor Morlev seems to have overlooked the Miller's instrument, and generally 
he seems inclined to make the pilgrimage a much tamer affair than it would 
appear to have been. I have endeavoured to show how the poet's decorous self- 
respect is reconciled with fidelity to the manners of the time. 



42 GEOFFREY CHAUCER ! 

Stories of Constance, Griselda, and Virginia : the two first of 
which may be justly described as tales of morality. The Franklin 
tells the old Breton lay of Dorigen and Arviragus, models of 
chivalrous virtue. The Prioress and the Second Nun relate holy 
legends of martrydom. These are " the gentles," and such are 
their tales. The tales of vulgar merriment are told by the Miller, 
the Reeve, the Wife of Bath, the Friar, the Summoner, the Mer- 
chant, the Shipman. And as regard is had to the condition of the 
narrator in the character of the tale ascribed to him, so the per- 
sons engaged in degrading adventure are below the rank of the 
gentles. Januarius, indeed, in the Merchant's Tale, is called a 
worthy knight ; but he is a blind dotard, long past knightly 
exercise and knightly feeling : and his May, who is so easily won 
to play him false, is represented as a maiden of small degree. The 
rank of all the other befooled heroes is plain : they are a carpenter, 
a miller, a summoner, a friar, and a merchant.^ The gentle order 
is respected. They join the company, and enjoy the ribald speech 
and behaviour of their riotous, inebriated, vulgar companions ; but 
they do not forfeit their self-respect, by contributing a share to the 
noisy merriment. When they have had enough of it, or when 
the tales threaten to become too boisterous, they use their influence 
to give a more sober tone to the proceedings. They do not break 
rough jests on each other as the vulgar do. And mine host knows 
his place sufficiently well to be less familiar and imperious with 
them than with the Miller and the Cook ; he is courteous to the 
Knight, and ludicrously over-polite to the Prioress. 

I may seem to have insisted too much on this distinction be- 
tween the "gentles" and the "roughs" in the Canterbury pil- 
grimage ; but the truth is, that we cannot have too vivid a hold 
of this distinction if we wisli to understand either the ' Canter- 
bury Tales,' or Chaucer's poetry generally. Unless we realise 
this, we cannot feel how thoroughly and intimately his poems are 
transfused with chivalrous sentiment. What is more, we cannot 
appreciate the perfect skill with which he has maintained this 
sentiment in the ' Canterbury Tales,' and at the same time 
transferred to his pages a faithful representation of vulgar manners 
in their wildest luxuriance. 

Waiving all questions as to whether Chaucer was most of Nor- 
man or of Saxon, of Celt or of Teuton, we cannot escape from 

1 Observe, in passing, anotlier evidence of Cliaucer's sense of courtly propriety 
in his Troilus and Cressida. The knights and ladies that heard his poems read 
would not have tolerated Shnkespeare's representation of Pandarus, one of the 
knights of Troy, as a gross procurer, or of Cressida, a lady of rank, as an incon- 
tinent wanton. Chaucer's Pandarus is an accomplished knight, moved to his 
questionable service by pity for the despair of his friend; Cressida the loveliest, 
most refined, and most discreet of widows, overcome by passionate love, dexterous 
intrigue, and favouring accidents. 



ll 



HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 43 

admitting that he was deeply impressed with the wide difference 
between chivalrous sentiments and the sentiments and manners 
prevalent among the dependants of chivalry. The difference may 
not have in reality been so profound as it was in ideal ; but 
Chaucer felt it deeply. How deeply, we see most clearly in the 
" Cuckoo and Nightingale," and the " Parliament of Birds," where 
the antagonistic sentiments are placed in express contrast. The 
Cuckoo is a vulgar bird, and takes gross ridiculous views of love : 
the Nightingale is a gentle bird, and regards love with delicate 
seriousness. Similar types are represented, with greater epic 
variety, in the " Parliament of Birds." There is no mistaking the 
contrast in these allegorical fables ; the vulgar birds, the Water 
Fowls, the Seed Fowls, and the Worm Fowls, are sharply snubbed 
for their chuckling vulgarity by the haughty and refined Birds of 
Prey. But in the ' Canterbury Tales ' the poet has achieved the 
triumph of making the antagonistic sentiments work sinoothly 
side by side, and that is really their main triumph as a broad 
picture of manners and character. There, with dignified carriage, 
are seen the type of men and women whose sensibilities were 
trained to appreciate the tender refinement of Chaucer, and who 
allowed themselves more boisterous entertainments only under 
decorous pretexts, listening without participating. Side by side, 
following their own humours with noisy independence, are their 
vulgar associates, stopping at every ale-stake to eat and drink, 
half choked with ribald laughter, finding in the contrast between 
themselves and the reserved gentles an additional incentive to 
their gross open mirth. The ' Canterbury Tales ' embody two 
veins of feeling that powerfully influenced the literature of the 
fifteenth century — the sentiment that fed on chivalrous romances, 
and the appetite for animal laughter that received among other 
gratifications the grotesque literature of miracle- plays. 

If we fail to perceive this contrast between the serious and the 
ludicrous side of the Canterbury pilgrimage, if we miss the poet's 
reconciliation of the two without repression of either, Chaucer's 
genius, in so far as regards manners and character, has laboured 
for us in vain. A dead weight flattens his figures into the page. 
The exquisite delicacy of his delineation is confused. We drag 
down the Knight and the Prioress by involving them in the re- 
sponsibility of the Miller's Tale : we crush the life out of the 
Miller and the Summoner, and reduce them to wretched tameness 
by supposing them to fraternise with the Knight in a certain 
amount of decorous restraint. The pilgrimage becomes a muddled, 
jumbled, incoherent, unintelligible thing. 

We must not, however, allow our attention to two large divis- 
ions, however much that may be the key to a right understand- 
ing of the ' Canterbury Tales,' to make us overlook the varied 



44 GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 

types that lie within these divisions. Every character, indeed, is 
typical — Knight, Squire, Yeoman, Prioress, Monk, Friar, Mer- 
chant, Clerk, Sergeant of Law, Franklin, Cheapside Burgess, 
Cook, Shipman, Doctor of Physic, Wife of Bath, Parson, Plough- 
man, Miller, Manciple, Reeve, Summoner, Pardoner : and the 
characteristics of their various lines of life are drawn as no other 
generation has been in equal space. I shall not attempt to pick 
out supreme examples of Chaucer's skill. The compression of 
masterly touches in that Prologue can hardly be spoken of in sane 
language : there is not one of the seven or eight hundred lines 
but contains something to admire. 

Apart from the skill of the delineation, one typical individual 
is specially interesting from his relations to the time, and that is 
the poor Parson. He cannot be said to belong, in rank at least, 
to the gentle class : he is of poor extraction, the brother of the 
Ploughman. He represents the serious element among the lower 
classes. During the riot of the pilgrimage, he is put down and 
silenced. He ventures to rebuke the Host for his profane language, 
and is jeered at and extinguished by that worthy as a Lollard. 
But when the ribald intoxication of the road has exhausted itself, 
his grave voice is heard and respected : and he brings the pilgrims 
into Canterbury with a tale more in harmony with the ostensible 
object of their journey. 



CHAPTER II. 
CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES AND SUCCESSORS. 

I. — English Contemporaries. 

(1332-1400?) 

I. William Langland — Piers the Plow?naii. 

This chapter deals with second-rate, third-rate, and fourth-rate 
poets or versifiers who flourished from the time of Chaucer down 
to the early part of the sixteenth century. Chaucer had no worthy 
rival among his contemporaries, and no English poet worthy to 
be placed by his side appeared before the time of Spenser. Still, 
it is well to characterise the poets of this sober interval, however 
humble. The task may be dreary, but we cannot always live 
with the great minds, and we are rewarded by the study of 
mediocrities with a more vivid sense of the beauty and strength 
of their betters. 

The most noteworthy of Chaucer's contemporaries was William 
Langland, author of the ' Vision of William concerning Piers the 
Plowman,' commonly known as the 'Vision of Piers Plowman.' 
Not much is ascertained about his life. Mr Skeat ^ considers it 
probable that he was born about 1332, at Cleobury Mortimer; 
that he wrote the first version of his poem (the A-text) in 1362, 
the second version (the B-text) in 1377, and the last version (the 
C-text) between 1380 and 1390; that he wrote a poem on the 
Deposition of Richard II. ; and that he did not long survive the 
accession of Henry IV. He is generally supposed to have been 
a secular priest. It is obvious that he was familiar with London ; 

1 See his elaborate Introduction to the Clarendon Press selection, and his 
editions of the various texts for the Early English Text Society. Mr Skeat accepts 
the argument of Professor C. H. Pearson (' North British Review.' April 1870) 
that the poet's name was Langley. 



46 Chaucer's contemporaries. 

and it may be inferred, from his mention of the Malvern Hills, 
that he lived at one time in their neighbourhood. 

Langland wrote in the old English alliterative metre ; but he 
went to the fashionable modern poetry for the machinery of dream 
and allegory. He walks abroad on a May morning, like any poet 
of the period, lays himself down by a stream under a broad bank, 
and as he looks into the water, is lulled to sleep by the merry 
sound. He then dreams, and sees an allegorical field, full of folk ; 
an allegorical tower, and an allegorical dale, with a dungeon. He 
is visited by a supernaturally lovely allegorical lady, who explains 
the meaning of what he sees. He is next witness of an allegorical 
drama ; an allegorical marriage is proposed, the banns are for- 
bidden, the whole party is carried before the king ; and, after 
several symbolical incidents, judgment is pronounced. Wishing 
now to change the scene, the poet awakes his dreamer, and pres- 
ently sends him asleep again, and opens up to him the vision of 
the Seven Deadly Sins, and of Piers the Plowman. The same 
artifice for changing the scene is used nine other times in the 
course of the poem. 

But though the machinery of the poem reminds us that Lang- 
land had read in the same school of poetry as Chaucer, he writes 
in a very different spirit. The author of Piers the Plowman was 
the Carlyle of his generation. He may be said to be the comple- 
mentary opposite of Chaucer. His criticism of life is stern. He 
refuses to enter the Garden of Mirth, which Chaucer was unwill- 
ing to quit ; he holds the mirror up to the ugliness, the misery, the 
discontent to be found outside this pleasant habitation. Chaucer 
and Langland furnish our first examples of the conflict between 
sensuous art and Puritanism. Langland is not a rabid Puritan — 
he is not a rabid man ; but he regards the votaries of the lust of 
the flesh and the lust of the eyes mournfully as deluded victims, 
and he denounces all minstrels and mirth-makers as heartless 
insulters of the miseries of the world. With what scorn he 
must have read, if he did read, the Legends of the Saints 
of Cupid ! Langland would have used even stronger language 
towards such a work, than Milton used towards Sir Philip Sid- 
ney's " Arcadia," when he called it " a vain amatorious poem." 
He makes no distinction between wandering minstrels and other 
purveyors for idle luxury ; he scorns them collectively with no 
less vehemence than the Puritans of the seventeenth century 
scorned the strolling player. Langland was far from having 
Milton's genius to tempt him into violations of his own doctrine ; 
but he had some difficulty in reconciling even the modest flights 
of his muse with his paramount and imperious moral earnestness. 
He had qualms about " meddling with makings," when he might 
have been saying his psalter or praying for his benefactors ; and 



WILLIAM LANGLAND. 47 

had to reassure himself by quoting the example of Cato and other 
holy men, who played a little that they might be more perfect in 
many places. 

The contrast between Piers and the ' Canterbury Tales ' is most 
instructive. Chaucer's pilgrims are not perfect, very far from it, 
but their shortcomings are exposed in a genial light. The poet 
shows us a company of people on the whole happy and self-satisfied, 
and alleges no reason why they should be otherwise. He is, in 
short, an artist of manners and character, who chooses a moment 
when his personages are seen to advantage, and when their imper- 
fections are amusing without being painfully offensive. Langland 
writes with a very different purpose. His aim is, not to seize the 
happy moment in things as they are, but to make a stern com- 
parison of things as they are with things as they ought to be — to 
place the existing state of society side by side with a lofty ideal, 
and elevate the depraved by energetic reproof and exhortation. 
What renders the difference in spirit between the two poets all the 
more remarkable is, that they treat of the same period ; and that, 
when we reflect independently on the substance of what they 
convey to us, we draw from both the same conclusions regarding 
the prevalent state of society. There is, indeed, one exception. 
Langland gives us no idea of the refinement of sentiment among 
the gentle folks : he includes them in the general censure of ribald 
amusements ; and, on the other hand, Chaucer, in his portrait of 
the " very perfect gentle knight," drew an ideal rarely realised, 
and suppressed the fact that knights very often treated their 
vassals with scant justice, and tyrannised over them like a cat 
among mice. Concerning the lower classes, we gather from them 
substantially the same facts. We learn from Chaucer, as well as 
from Langland, that merchants, millers, and cooks cheated their 
customers ; that reeves (or stewards) cheated their masters ; that 
doctors and lawyers were bent upon making money ; that monks 
were more conversant with field-sports than religious duties ; that 
friars were unconscionable beggars ; that pardoners told atrocious 
lies, and made audacious extortions from the credulous vulgar ; 
and that, amidst considerable drunkenness, waste, and ribaldry, 
there lived also men of honest industry and sincere piety. And if 
we look beneath the surface of I>angland's invective, we see that 
poor people were not reduced to a state of uninterrupted wretch- 
edness by the oppression of the rich, and their own intemperance. 
We reflect that, though their recreations were not to the poet's 
taste, their life must have been occasionally brightened by these 
japers and jugglers and janglers of jests. But so different are 
Chaucer and Langland in the spirit of their pictures, that it needs 
an effort of reflection to discover the shadows of the one and the 
lights of the other. 



48 Chaucer's contemporaries. 

Take a few details of Langland's picture of the life of England. 
In the " fair field of folk," described in his prologues, he sees all 
manner of men moving about, the mean and the rich, " working 
and wandering as the world asketh." As Chaucer puts the 
knight in the foreground, so Langland gives the first place to 
his ideal of humble virtue — the hard-working honest ploughman — 

" Some putten them to the plough, played full said, 
In setting and in sowing svvonken ^ full hard, 
And tuonnen thatzvasters with gluttony destroyeth.'''' 

The sight of conscientious labour at once arouses the moralist's 
anger at unprofitable indolence. He places in immediate con- 
trast a form of immorality most despicable in his eyes, and most 
pardonable in the eyes of the artist — 

" And some putten them to pride, apparelled them thereafter 
In countenance of clothing comen disguised." 

In this category he would probably have placed Chaucer's youth- 
ful squire, embroidered as a mead. After his ideal of active life, 
with the unproductive display that consumes its fruits, comes an 
ideal of contemplative hfe — 

" In prayers and in penance putten them many ; 
All for love of our Lord liveden full strait, 
In hope for to have heavenric bliss; 

As anchorites and hermits, that holden them in their cells, 
An coveten not in county to kairen"'^ about, 
For no lickerish livelihood their likam^ to please." 

Then follow various contrasts : Thriving merchants — " as it seem- 
eth to our sight that such men thriveth " — minstrels, beggars, 
palmers, hermits, friars, pardoners, absentee parish priests ; idle 
and dishonest men — 

"Bidders* and beggars fast about gede,^ 
With theii- belly and their bags of bread full y-crammed; 
Faiteden ^ for their food, foughten at ale ; 
In gluttony, God it wot, gone they to bed. 
And risen with ribaldry the Roberdes knaves; 
Sleep and sorry sloth pursueth them ever. 

Pilgrims and palmers plighted them together. 
To seek Saint James and saintes in Rome; 
They went forth in their way with many M'ise tales. 
And hadden leave to lie all their life after. 



1 Toiled. 2 Carry themselves, gad. 3 Body. 

4 Synonym for beggars. ^ Goed — went. 

6 Made up tales — used false pretences. 



WILLIAM LANGLAND. ^g 

I saw some that saiden they had y-sought saintes; 

To each a tale that they told their tongue was tempered to lie, 

More than to say sooth ; it seemed by their speech. 

Hermits on an heap, with hooked staves, 
Wenten to Walsingham, and their wenches after; 
Great lubbers and long, that loath were to swink, 
Clothed them in copes to be knowen from other; 
And shapen them hermits their ease to have." 

How different is this righteous animosity from the spirit of such 
artists as Burns and Chaucer, whose eyes are all for picturesque- 
ness and humour ! The difference is still more marked in his 
picture of the interior of an inn. Glutton is tempted to enter on 
his way to confession ; goes in swearing, and finds a collection of 
habitual topers, — Cis the shoemaker's wife, Wat the \\ arrener and 
his wife, Tim the tinker and two of his apprentices, Hick the 
hackneyman, Hugh the needle-seller, Clarice of Cock Lane, the 
clerk of the Church, Daw the dyker. Sir Piers of Pridie, Pernel of 
Flanders, a ribibe-player, a rat-catcher, Robin the roper, Clement 
the cobbler. Rose the dish-seller, Godfrey of Garlickhithe, Griffin 
the Welshman. All the ugly details of the debauchery are brought 
into prominence. They barter clothes, with noisy squabbling over 
their value ; they pass the cup greedily, snatching it from one 
another's hands with laughs and frowns, and continue their noisy 
carouse till evensong. Glutton drinks a gallon and a gill of ale, 
and manifests the most repulsive symptoms of intoxication. The 
picture, as a whole, is graphic, but intentionally coarse and dis- 
gusting ; throughout, the author's purpose is to make debauchery 
odious by showing its ugliest side. The glutton is not the hero of 
the evening, the triumphant leader of coarse delights ; he is a 
moral spectacle, a warning to drunkards and ne'er-do-wells. Con- 
trast Langland's treatment of him with Chaucer's treatment of the 
Cook, at the close of the pilgrimage, before the Manciple's Tale. 
The Cook is roundly reproved by the Manciple for making a beast 
of himself; but his drunken eccentricities are presented in such a 
way as to make them laughable rather than disgusting. 

Langland is not without genuine humour,^ though his moral 
purpose forbids him to allow it anything like full scope. He 
shows unmistakable enjoyment of fun in his account of the career 
of " Lady Meed," the allegorical embodiment of wealth ; he 
narrates with much gusto the respectful treatment she received 
from judges, clerks of the court, and confessors, and even from 
the king himself. In his account of the Seven Deadly Sins, also, 
whose characteristic appearances he describes with considerable 
pictorial force, he sometimes relaxes into a smile or a laugh. 

1 Mr Lowell finds in Langland an equal sense of fun with Chaucer's; but Mr 
Lowell would find a sense of fun in the demonstrations of Euclid. 



50 CHAUCER S CONTEMPORARIES. 

Perhaps the most unequivocal flash of humour in the whole poem 
is his making Avarice mistake the meaning of " restitution " — 

" * Repentedest thou ever,' quoth Repentance, 'ne restitution madest?' 
'Yes, once I was harboured,' quoth he, ' with an heap of chapmen; 
I rose when they were a-rest, and y-rifled their mails ! ' 
'That was no restitution,' quoth Repentance, ' but a robber's theft; 
Thou hadst be better worthy be hanged therefore 
Than for all that that thou hast here showed.' 
' I weened rifling were restitution,' quoth he; ' for I learned never read on 

book. 
And I can no French in faith, but of the farthest end of Norfolk.' " 

But humour is, on the whole, rare in Langland's work, and 
certainly it was no part of his purpose. He was a moralist, not 
a humorist. If his ridicule had produced laughter for laughter's 
sake, and raised no moral disapprobation, he would probably have 
taken himself to fask for having missed his mark. He laughed 
at things that he wished to see abolished, and used ridicule as a 
means to make them hateful and loathsome, and to secure their 
abolition. He wished to make the glutton odious as a waster 
of the fruits of honest labour, and so discourage intemperance. 
He caricatured Lady Meed to make people ashamed of paying 
respect to riches. He represented the palmer as ignorant of the 
way to truth, and made the friars pretend that Do- well dwelt 
only with them, in order to expose and thereby reform their 
hypocrisy and exaggerated pretensions. He satirised the unscru- 
pulous impositions of the pardoners, because he hated their un- 
profitable idleness and luxury, and was indignant at their robbing 
the poor man of his hard-earned bread. Langland is, in short, 
a Puritan of the fourteenth century. When we look from the 
' Canterbury Tales ' to his stern series of visions, we see that the 
antagonism between Cavalier and Roundhead began long before 
it culminated in civil war. Only, in Langland's time, the cham- 
pion of the poor was still hopeful of redress. Langland was an 
apostle of purification, not of reconstruction. He believed de- 
voudy in Holy Church, and desired only to see churchmen acting 
up to their professions. He raised not a word in dispute of the 
privileges of the nobility ; he desired only that they should re- 
member and discharge their duties to those beneath them. 

The cardinal virtue in Langland's eyes is industry. Like Car- 
lyle, he proclaims a gospel of work. He expresses the teaching 
of Kind Wit — that is, natural wit or common-sense, in a form 
that reminds us of Carlyle's — ' Two men I honour and no third.' 

" Kind wit would that each a wight wrought, 
Or in dyking or in delving or in travailing in prayers; 
Contemplative life or active life, Christ would men wrought." 



WILLIAM LANGLAND. 



51 



The paramount obligation of this duty is preachetl at every turn 
of the poem. The mere choice of Piers as the man that he de- 
Hghts to honour, still more his final transfiguration of the honest 
ploughman into a type of Christ, is a bold assertion of the dignity 
of the humblest labourer, and the contemptibility of idleness. 
And there are many minor inculcations of the same doctrine. 
When the Seven Deadly Sins are converted and cry out for a 
guide to Truth, Piers steps forward and offers to conduct them 
when they have helped him to ear his field of corn ; and he sets 
them all sturdily to work, with the exception of the Knight, who 
undertakes to secure him protection for the fruits of his toil. The 
substance of the teaching of Holy Church is, that faith without 
works is " dead as a door-post " ; and this is in part another as- 
pect of the same doctrine. Two of the five sons of Inwit (Con- 
science), the constable of the castle that Nature has built to hold 
Anima (the Soul), are Work-well-with-thy-hands and Sir Godfrey 
Go-well.^ Again, industry is the most prominent of the qualifica- 
tions for obtaining the company of Do-well. And as Langland 
resembles Carlyle in his earnest upholding of the duty of work, so 
the resemblance extends to the provision of strenuous punishment 
for idlers. We have seen how our poet denounces sturdy beggars 
and lazy lubbers of hermits. When these gentry come to honest 
Piers, pretending that they cannot work for him, but offering to 
give him the benefit of their prayers, he allows hunger to restore 
them the use of their limbs. In like manner, Conscience is a 
strong advocate of the rod for the lazy back. 

Another doctrine, less obtrusively expressed, is the right of 
individual judgment in matters of religion. This is not exactly 
a protest in favour of reason as against authority. It really is part 
of Langland's championship of the illiterate but honest poor. He 
pits their Kind-wit or common-sense against the learning of the 
clergy. He does this indirectly through the medium of his alle- 
gorical personages. Piers obtains from Truth a pardon containing 
only two lines — 

"They that have done good, shall go into eternal life; 
They that have done evil, into eternal fire." 

A priest laughs at this pardon, and at first Piers is in despair, 
and thinks of leaving his plough and taking to prayer and pen- 
ance ; but after a little he is emboldened to dispute the priest's 
authority. At another time, William the poet in his own person 
opposes Clergy, one of his characters, and stoutly maintains that 

1 Mr Skeat commits a slight and natural inadvertence in describing these five 
sons as The Five Senses. They are See-well, Hear-well, Say-well, Work-well, and 
Go-well. 



52 CHAUCER S CONTEMPORARIES. 

learning is more of a hindrance than a help towards the kingdom 
of heaven — 

" Aren none rather y-ravished from the right belief 
Than are the cunning clerks that con many books; 
Ne none sooner saved ne sadder ^ of belief 
Than plowmen and pastors and poor common labourers. 

Souters^ and shepherds, such lewed^ jots 
Piercen with a pater-noster the palace of heaven, 
And passen purgatory penanceless at their hence parting 
Into the bliss of paradise, for their pure belief" 

Further, he makes Nature Wit laugh at the voluble talk of Dame 
Study. It is remarkable, however, that in his enlargement of 
the original poem he qualifies this extreme disparagement of 
learning. In Fassns XII., Imaginative reminds him of the good 
done by men of learning, bids him never despise them, and tells 
him that Learning and Nature Wit are of the same kindred, and, 
indeed, near cousins. 

The poem, as a whole, is not a connected historical allegory 
like the ' Pilgrim's Progress ' or the ' Holy War.' The poet 
evades the difficulty of weaving the action of his allegorical 
personages into a simple connected story. He presents us with 
a series of eleven more or less disjointed visions or dreams, and 
leaves us to divine for ourselves whether or not these visions are 
allegories of consecutive stages in the religious life. On exam- 
ination, we find that the visions are not consecutive. The first 
vision is a view of life by itself, designed to symbolise the cor- 
rupting influence of wealth ("Lady Meed"), its frequent union 
with falsehood, its doubtful compatibility with truth and con- 
science, its possession of the services of wisdom and wit. The 
next vision is a complete change of scene with a new set of 
allegorical personages ; it represents the conversion of the Seven 
Deadly Sins by Repentance, and their reformation by Piers 
Plowman, a poor husbandman, who is afterwards seen to typify 
the condescension of Christ to human nature. Then follow the 
Vision of Wit, Study, Clergy, and Scripture ; The Vision of 
Fortune, Nature, and Reason ; The Vision of Imaginative ; the 
Vision of Conscience, Patience, and Haukyn, the Active Man — 
a series of visions all bearing on the life of Do-well, the good 
life, the life of honest industry. Next we have the Vision of 
the Soul and of the Tree of Charity ; the Vision of Faith, Hope, 
and Charity; the Vision of the Triumph of Piers the Plowman — 
a series of visions bearing on the life of Do-bet, the better life, 

1 More sober and sure. 2 Shoemakers. 3 Illiterate. 



WILLIAM LANGLAND. 53 

the life of faith, hope, and charity. Finally, we have two visions 

— the Vision of Grace and the Vision of Antichrist — bearing on 
the Hfe of Do-best, the best hfe. Taken as a whole, these groups 
of visions do not allegorise any religious progress, any growth 
of religion in the soul ; the one is not deduced from the other. 
In the last three divisions of the poem certain virtues and 
heavenly endowments are set forth in order from good to best ; 
but this is an order of regular exposition, a climax, and not an 
order of development in the progressive Christian. Piers Plow- 
man is the hero of the poem, and the chief connecting link of 
the dreams, inasmuch as the author, once having seen him, is 
very desirous, in more than one of the subsequent dreams, to see 
him again. 

In describing the various personages of his allegory, Langland, 
as we have already said, has another object than to produce an 
artistic picture. Yet in his description of the Seven Deadly 
Sins — a subject that often engaged mediaeval artists — the word- 
painting, simply as such, is exceedingly powerful. The effect 
cannot be said to be pleasing ; the poet or preacher was himself 
full of strong abhorrence of the subject, desired to disgust and 
repel his reader no less strongly, and has emphatically succeeded 

— at least for modern readers. But the energy of the character- 
isation is tremendous — 

" And then came Covetice — can I him not descrive, 
80 hungrily and hollow Sir Hervy him looked. 
He was beetle-browed, and babber-lipped also, 
With two bleared eyen as a blind hag; 
And as a leathern purse lolled his cheeks, 
Well sidder ^ than his chin : they chivelled for eld; 
And as a bondman of his bacon his beard was bedravelled. 
With a hood on his head, a lousy hat above. 
And in a tawny tabard of twelve winter age, 
All to-torn and bawdy, and full of lice creeping; 
But if that a louse could have leapen the better, 

She should not have walked on that walsh '•^ so was it threadbare." 

Such hideous and loathsome ideals, though caviare to the 
general run of moderns, may have been enjoyed by our Middle 
Age ancestors. They were realised in the moral-plays, doubtless 
with the best intentions ; but they probably rather amused than 
instructed the rude audience. Spenser also applied his genius 
to similar subjects ; but whether from moral enthusiasm or from 
a disinterested taste for horrors, it is difficult to say. 

As regards the use of the alliterative metre in ' Piers Plow- 
man,' although Langland was contemporary with Chaucer, we 

1 Longer. 2 Filthy garment. (?) 



54 CHAUCER S CONTEMPORARIES. 

must not look upon this as an archaic affectation or a proof of 
uncultivated rusticity. Langland acted wisely in choosing the 
alliterative metre. Of the forms then in use, it was decidedly 
the best for a didactic poem. Some critics have shown an 
unreasonable prejudice against alliteration; it has even beenMI 
stigmatised as "a. vulgar trick." Old Thomas Fuller, and the 
unknown framers of our popular proverbial wisdom, knew its 
value for aphorisms and epigrams — at least they used it, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, with good effect. And in like manner, 
Langland, whether by chance or by good judgment, adopted the 
form best suited to his materials. Not to mention its value 
as a help to the memory, how much better than jingling octo- 
syllabics, sing-song ballad metre, or even than heroic couplets, is 
its incisive emphasis suited to the vigour of Langland's thought 
and sentiment. 

The poem on the deposition of Richard II., ascribed by Mr 
Wright to Langland, has every appearance of being his composi- 
tion. There are constant minute coincidences of expression ; and 
the general strain of the sentiment, the fierce scorn for wasteful 
idleness, and the burning indignation against oppression and 
neglect of the weak, as well as the general energy of the verse, are 
in eminent correspondence with * Piers Plowman.' 

2. John Gower (d. 1408). 

Gower is intrinsically a much less significant figure than Lang- 
land, but his name is more closely associated with Chaucer's, and 
occurs most readily next to his in any enumeration of the poets of 
the time. The basis of this reputation is very clearly stated by 
Mr Earle (English Philology, p. 76) : " One is apt to imagine, 
previous to a study of their works, that they " (Chaucer and 
Gower) " were a par nobile fratrum — brothers and equals in 
poetry and genius ; and that they had contributed equally, or | 
nearly so, towards the making of English literature. But this is 
very far from being the case. That which united them at first, and 
which continues to be the sole ground of coupling their names to- 
gether, is just this, that they wrote in the same general strain and : 
in the same language. By this is meant, first, that they were both 
versed in the learning then most prized, and both delivered what 
they had to say in the terms then most admired ; and, secondly, 
that both wrote the English of the Court. If affinity^ of genius 
had been the basis of classification, the author of ' Piers Plowman ' 
had more right to rank with Chaucer than the prosaic Gower. 

1 1 should consider the word " affinity " rather loose in this connection. I 
have enlarged upon the disparity, or even antagonism, of genius between the two. 
But Mr Eyrie's general meaning is obvious. 



JOHN GOWER. 55 

But in this Chaucer and Gower are united, in that they both wrote 
the particular form of Enghsh which was henceforward to be 
estabhshed as the standard form of the national language ; and 
their books were the leading English classics of the best society 
down to the opening of a new era under Elizabeth." 

Even this modified title to rank with Chaucer needs some 
qualification. Gower was of about the same age as Chaucer, 
probably several years older, but he did not write in English till 
his old age. Up to 1393 he was known to the reading public only 
as a writer of French and Latin; and after that date he continued 
to use Latin as the medium for his political poetry. 

It requires some courage to begin a course of reading in Gower 
after Professor Lowell's energetic summing up and appalling illus- 
tration of his demerits. " Gower," he says, " has positively raised 
tediousness to the precision of science ; he has made dulness an 
heirloom for the students of our literary history. As you shp to 
and fro on the frozen levels of his verse, which give no foothold 
to the mind ; as your nervous ear awaits the inevitable recurrence 
of his rhyme, regularly pertinacious as the tick of an eight-day 
clock, and reminding you of Wordsworth's 

' Once more the ass did lengthen out 
The hard, dry see-saw of his horrible bray,' — 

you learn to dread, almost to respect, the powers of this indefatiga- 
ble man. He is the undertaker of the fair mediaeval legend, and 
his style has the hateful gloss, the seemingly unnatural length, of 
a coffin. I^ove, beauty, passion, nature, art, life, the natural and 
the theological virtues — there is nothing beyond his power to dis- 
enchant, nothing out of which the tremendous hydraulic press of 
his allegory (or whatever it is, for I am not sure if it be not some- 
thing even worse) will not squeeze all feeling and freshness, and 
leave it a juiceless pulp. It matters not where you try him, 
whether his story be Christian or pagan, borrowed from history or 
fable, you cannot escape him. Dip in at the middle or the end, 
dodge back to the beginning, the patient old man is there to take 
you by the button and go on with his imperturbable narrative. 
You may have left off with Clytemnestra, and you may begin again 
with Samson ; it makes no odds, for you cannot tell one from 
t'other. . . . Our literature had to lie by and recruit for more 
than four centuries ere it could give us an equal vacuity in Tupper, 
so persistent a uniformity of commonplace in the ' Recreations of 
a Country Parson.' " Warton's verdict is more solemn than this, 
but hardly more favourable ; and it is a melancholy thought that 
the old man tedious has of late found no sympathisers. 



56 Chaucer's contemporaries. 

John Gower was an esquire of Kent.^ He was not in priest's 
orders, but he was so far connected with the Church that he lield 
the Hving of Great Braxted, in Essex. He was the most widely 
read scholar of his age ; saw but little of the Court ; had a 
recluse's peevishness and unfavourable views of life ; and a 
recluse's pleasure in rank-flavoured tales. One cannot but have 
a certain compunction in transcribing Mr Lowell's wicked rending 
to pieces of the industrious old rhymer's reputation : all the more 
when one sees from his description of the effects produced upon 
him by his lady's voice and the metres of the old romances, that, 
prosy and feeble though his writings are, he was not altogether 
dead to the higher emotions. If it could be of any service in 
making his dulness more acceptable, one would be glad to apply 
to him Chaucer's account of the dejected Arcite — 

"And if he hearde song or instrument 
Then would he weep, he mighte not be stent ; 
So feeble were his spirits and so low." 

In this susceptibility of ear, " moral Gower," as Chaucer called 
him, bore a resemblance to the judicious Hooker, whom he re- 
sembled farther in scholarship and in feebleness of constitution. . 

Govver's principal French work, entitled Speculum Meditantis 
(' Mirror of a Meditating Mind') — which seems to have been a 
didactic poem on Vices and Virtues, and the principal support of 
his *' moral " character — is now lost : but some French Balades of 
his have been preserved. His Latin poems were political in their 
scope. The first of them — Vox Claniantis, 'The Voice of one 
crying aloud,' or ' An Earnest Appeal ' — was evoked by the rebel- 
lion of Jack Straw in 1381. In this poem, while satirising the 
corruptions of society, which he considers the distempering causes 
of such insurrections, he shows a warm attachment to the young 
king, from whom he had received tokens of favour ; but in sub- 
sequent productions, in the same tone of complaint against the 
times, he seems to have changed sides, and includes the king 
among other social corruptions.^ 

His principal Enghsh work — almost his only preserved com- 
position in English — is Co7ifessio Amantis, ' The Confession of a 
Lover.' The word "confession " is here used in its ecclesiastical 
sense : Confessio Amantis is not an autobiographical work like 
Augustine's Confessions, or the Confessions of an Opium-eater, 
but a dialogue between a penitent and his confessor. Strangely 
enough for the " moral " Gower, the religion of the parties is not 

1 Sir Harris Nicolas. See Morley's English Writers, ii. 69; and Thynne's 
Animadversions on Speght's Chaucer, Early English Text Society, p. 14. 

2 Wright's Political Poems and Songs, in the Master of the Rolls series. 



JOHN GOWER. 57 

Christianity, but love ; the confessor is a priest of Venus. Sub- 
stantially, the work is a miscellany of tales, fantastic love-philoso- 
phy, pseudo-Aristotelian mysticism (embracing alchemy, astrology, 
magic, palmistry, geomancy). The confessional form is merely a 
device for stringing this heterogeneous lore together. The love 
portion of it is described by Warton : ^ " The ritual of religion is 
applied to the tender passion, and Ovid's ' Art of Love ' is blended 
with the breviary. In the course of the confession, every evil affec- 
tion of the human heart, which may tend to impede the progress or 
counteract the success of love, is scientifically subdivided, and its 
fatal effects exemplified by a variety of apposite stories, extracted 
from classics and chronicles." Some of these stories, particularly 
two cases of incest, were pronounced by Chaucer very " immoral " — 

"Of whiche cursed stories I say fy ! " 
For himself, Chaucer said that — 

" He of full avisement 
Would never write in none of his sermons 
Of such unkind- abominations." 

In spite, however, of these " incidental divertisements," readers of 
Mrs Stovve literature would find Gower very dry material : these 
oases occur in a very Avide Sahara. 

The inaccuracy of his statements regarding personages mem- 
tioned in Scripture and in Latin and Greek classical literature, 
becomes credible only when we remember that he lived before 
the revival of learning. Before the invention of movable types, the 
multiplication and diffusion of books in manuscript was not cal- 
culated to preserve accurate historical knowledge. The student 
was not likely to have access to many books, and the few acces- 
sible to him probably bore no indication of the relative dates and 
general position of their authors. He was to be pardoned under 
the circumstances, if he believed that Ovid was the founder of the 
Latin language, or that Noah and Abraham were old writers on 
astrology and magic. Gower had to trust voluminous compila- 
tions of theory, fact, and fiction, made by men whose scholarly 
advantages were litde superior to his own : Secretum Secretorum 
Aristotelis (' The Secret of the Secrets of Aristotle ') ; Me7norice 
Seculonim (' Memorials of the Ages ') ; Speculum Rcgu7}i (' Mirror 
of Kings'); Gesia Romanorum ('Acts of the Romans'). His 
notions of chronology are sufficiently well illustrated by his sum- 

1 History of English Poetry —Section xix. (on Gower). 2 Unnatural. 



58 Chaucer's contemporaries 

mary of the wonderful knowledge and the renowned teachers of 

Ulysses : — 

" He was a worthy knight and king 
And clerk renowned in everything. 
He was a great rhetorian; 
He was a great magician : 
Of TulHus the rhetoric; 
Of King Zoroastes the magic ; 
Of Ptolemy the Astronomy ; 
Of Plato the Philosophy; 
Of Daniel the sleepy dreams ; 
Of Neptune the water streams; 
Of Solomon and the Proverbs ; 
Of Macer all the strength of herbs; 
And the physic of Hypocras; 
And like unto Pythagoras 
Of surgery he knew the cures." 



3. Miracle-Plays and Mysteries. 

Though there is no pre-eminent chief in this species of compo- 
sition, they formed so large a part of the entertainment of the 
vulgar during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that we must 
try to make out their characteristics. There are at least three 
allusions to them in the ' Canterbury Tales,' all in the Prologue 
and Tale of the Miller, The Miller cries in Pilate's voice {FroL 
16) ; Absolon is said to " play Herod on a scaffold high" {Ta/e, 
198) ; and Nicholas makes reference to Noah's difficulty in getting 
his wife into the ark (353) — a stock incident in the Mysteries. 
We may therefore suppose that, when Chaucer wrote the Miller's 
Tale, he was fresh from an exhibition of these Scriptural dramas. 
It will be seen in what here follows, that though they were pro- 
fessedly designed for the encouragement of morality and holiness, 
they harmonise in spirit more with the Miller's Tale than the 
Parson's, 

Miracle-plays, in the strict sense of the term, were dramatic 
representations of miracles performed by saints ; Mysteries, of in- 
cidents from the New Testament and elsewhere, bearing upon the 
fundamental principles of Roman Catholicism, This distinction, 
however, is hardly kept up in the practical application of the 
terms. They were performed in the churches, or on stages erected 
in the churchyard or in the fields, or, as at Coventry, on movable 
stages wheeled from street to street. The actors were in some 
cases the brethren of a monastery, in some cases the members of 
a trade guild. The authors were monks. As regards other par- 
ticulars of the representation, " it appears," says Mr Wright in 
his Introduction to the ' Chester Plays,' " that the spectators paid 
for the sight : either seats were purchased, or a collection was 



MIRACLE-PLAYS AND MYSTERIES. 59 

made. At a later period we find that . . . there were different 
floors or partitions to represent heaven, earth, and hell, and that 
very intricate and ingenious machinery must have been used to 
produce difterent effects. Masks were also used, at least in the 
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, so that the whole performance 
must have borne considerable analogy to the rude Greek comedy 
in the days of Thespis." 

Besides a few isolated plays, as old as the fifteenth or even the 
fourteenth century, there have been preserved three complete sets 
of Mysteries dramatising Biblical and apocryphal incidents from 
the Creation to the death and resurrection of Christ, and His 
ascension and return in glory on doomsday : the ' Townley Mys- 
teries,' published by the Surtees Society in 1836; the 'Coventry 
Mysteries,' edited for the Shakespeare Society by Mr Halliwell, 
1 841 ; the 'Chester Plays,' edited for the same Society by Mr T. 
Wright, 1847.^ 

Though the ostensible object of these plays was to instruct the 
illiterate in a knowledge of Scripture, and edify them in love of 
God and fear of the devil, the effect of them as a whole must, to use 
Chaucer's classification, have partaken more of coarse comedy than 
of either morality or holiness. It was natural that they should 
occur to Chaucer when he began to write the first of his series of 
ribald tales, and that he should strike the key-note of boisterous 
humour by making the Miller break through the decorous recep- 
tion of the Knight's Tale with a voice like Pilate's in the Mys- 
teries. Various liberties were taken with Scriptural personages 
for the sake of comic effect. Both in the Chester and in the 
Townley series, Noah's wife is represented as somewhat of a 
shrew, who gives the patriarch a great deal of trouble before he 
can get her into the ark. In the ' Coventry Mysteries,' Joseph is 
represented as a contemptible and impotent old man, who marries 
Mary under compulsion, alleges that he is neither able nor willing 
to act as a husband, is certain that he has been dishonoured when 
Mary proves to be Avith child, and expresses his conviction in very 
plain language. Mary's account of her condition is treated with 
coarse incredulity by everybody, till her veracity is vindicated by 
a miracle. The shepherds to whom the angel declared the birth 
of Christ give another opportunity for ludicrous invention. Herod 
is a favourite character — a ludicrously inflated tyrant, blasphem- 
ously rampant and boastful, carried off in the end by a demon. 
Even the Massacre of the Innocents becomes a rude burlesque : 
the mothers assail the soldiers with gross language, and beat them 
with extravagant fury. In this way is the Scripture brought 

1 There is an elaborate account of Miracle-Plays, Moral Plays, &c., in Collier's 
' History of Dramatic Poetry.' Hone's ' Ancient Mysteries Described ' is an enter- 
taining book. 



6o Chaucer's contemporaries. 

down to the level of the multitude ; and one does not wonder that 
these Mysteries were often denounced by earnest preachers. There 
doubtless is religious feeling in them, earnest praise and adoration 
of God ; but it is difficult to suppose that the serious element pre- 
dominated over the comic. The coarse comic incidents must have 
flavoured the whole ; in judging of the probable effect of the 
serious portions, we must take into account the ludicrous sur- 
roundings, and we must not suppose that the rude audience were 
so very differently constituted from ourselves that they viewed 
with gravity things that appear supremely ludicrous to us. The 
cooks and millers, cobblers and carpenters, of the fourteenth 
century, were by no means blind to comic effect ; and if they had 
their chuckle over some of the grotesque figures in church archi- 
tecture, they were not as solemn as Methodists at the exhibition 
of a Mystery. It is apparent on all hands that the sense of the 
ridiculous was very powerful in the fourteenth century ; religion 
no more than love was sacred from its rude sport. Remember 
that these Mysteries were exhibited at festivals, and consider the 
following picture of how the common people enjoyed themselves 
at Christmas ^ — 

*' The lewed people then algates agree, 
And carols singen every Christmas tide, 
Not with shamefasteness but jocundly, 
And holly boughs about; and all aside 
The brenning fire them eaten and tliem drink, 
And laughen merrily, and maken rout, 
And pipe and dancen and them rage : ne swink 
Ne nothing else twelve day they woulde not." 

The Mysteries exhibited on holidays, either general Church holi- 
days or days sacred to the memory of some patron saint, were part 
and parcel of this hearty enjoyment. At York, previous to the 
year 1426, the revelling and drunkenness at the representation of 
the Mysteries was such that they had to be discontinued. We 
have curious evidence of the amusing character of Mysteries 
generally in a portion of a Latin story quoted by Mr Wright. 
Certain persons walking in a meadow " saw before them a vast 
crowd of people assembled, and heard them now hushed and silent, 
now bursting into loud laughter. Wondering, therefore, why 
there was so great a congregation in such a place, they concluded 
that a performance was going on of those plays that we call 
77iiraclesr What could be more significant? One class of person- 
ages seem to have been special objects of merriment — the devil 
and his attendant demons got up with horns, tails, claws, and 
hideous mask. Professor Morley, who holds that the chief interest 

1 Quoted in Hone's Ancient Mysteries, p. 90. 



METRICAL ROMANCES. 6l 

of the Mysteries was tragic, affirms that the whole endeavour in 
the make-up of the demons was to render them terrible. I am 
very far from agreeing with this. The women and children 
among the spectators might be horrified, as they still are at ugly 
masks ; but a sturdy Englishman out for a holiday and well lined 
with beer would probably laugh the louder the more shrilly his 
weaker friends were excited to scream. When we study the 
demons closely, it becomes obvious that terror was not the sole 
aim of their existence. Take, for example, the devil of the 
' Coventry Mysteries,' the most serious of our three sets. Hov/ 
does he express himself when cast by God out of heaven ? — 

" At thy bidding thy will I werk, 
And pass fro joy to paine smert, 
Now I am a devil full derk 

That was an angel bright. 
Now to hell the way I take, 

In endless pain there to be pight. 
For fear of fire a 

In hell dungeon my den is dight." 

A single utterance like this, accompanied doubtless by the 
sound of a horn, as the blowing of the nose is still rendered in 
pantomimes, would effectually destroy the devil's influence for 
terror, at least in that representation, not to say that it would 
unsettle any serious impression from what preceded. I have 
noticed two other places in the ' Coventry Mysteries ' where the 
great enemy of mankind expresses his emotion in the same way. 
So far from helping to make demons more terrible, the Mysteries 
embodied the hideous ideals of the popular imagination, and 
raised temporary laughter by making them ridiculous — treated 
them for the time being, as so much ludicrous capital. If 
superstitious fears had been absolutely bodiless before then — if 
the Mysteries had been the means of clothing the devil in popu- 
lar imagination with claws, hoofs, horns, and tail — it might have 
been argued that they did add to the dreadful attributes of his 
fallen majesty. And even as it is, it may reasonably be maintained 
that the laughter was temporary, and that the actual representa- 
tion of the hideous being had a permanent effect of terror. I am 
inclined, however, to believe that the Mysteries left the fear of 
the devil where they found it, and simply provided the vulgar 
with a good day's sport. 

4. Metrical Romances. 

The mythopoeic faculty or unstudied imagination of the Middle 
Ages was occupied in the main with two kinds of matter : the 
heroism of religion, and the heroism of chivalry, miraculous saints 



62 Chaucer's contemporaries. 

and no less miraculous knights. The legends of the saints and the 
romances of the knights grew out of the same unchastened desire of 
the natural man after superhuman ideals ; the desire to escape from 
the chilling limitations to perfection of character and nobility of 
achievement in actual life. Such, in the broadest view, was the 
origin of Middle Age romances, religious as well as secular ; they 
were produced by the generating force that created Romulus, 
Numa, and Egeria, Achilles, Ulysses, and Circe, — a passion for 
the marvellous that still survives and operates, and promises to 
bid defiance for many coming generations to all appliances for the 
discovery and diffusion of verified knowledge. Doubtless in all 
ages many less generous motives have conspired to the invention 
and spread of fictions ; patron saints have been made wonderful 
in the eyes of devotees, and ancestors have been magnified to move 
the bounty of descendants. In most cases, too, the passion has 
taken a patriotic turn. It was inevitable that men should, in 
creating heroes, show a preference for their own country and 
kindred. Still, vanity much less than disinterested love of the 
marvellous has ever presided over all such creations. 

In the voluminous discussions regarding the origin of mediaeval 
romance — whether it was Scaldic, or Arabic, or Classic — too 
little respect has been shown to the permanent sources of romance 
in the human mind. It has never required any great impulse 
to excite those sources to productive activity. The magnificent 
enthusiasm of religion and chivalry that sent the crusaders to 
Palestine could not have failed to evoke a frenzy of romantic 
invention. When the English began to be conscious of a 
national unity, they made for the.mselves a fabulous connection 
with such ancient history as was known to them : derived their 
government from the Trojans, and their Christianity from Joseph 
of Arimathea. They provided themselves with a national hero, 
surrounded him with knights, and engaged him and them in 
honourable adventures. It is vain to look for a historical basis 
to the operations of the romantic imagination ; this faculty owns 
no allegiance to fact. Our business, however, is not with romance 
in general, but with the very humble romances extant in English 
in the time of Chaucer. 

Chaucer has burlesqued the metrical romances of the wander- 
ing minstrels in his tale of Sir Thopas. He enumerates some of 
the productions that will bear comparison with his parody — 

" Men speaken of romans of price 
Of Horn Child and of Ypotis, 

Of Bevis and Sir Guy, 
Of Sir Libeaux and Pleindamour; 
But Sir Thopas beareth the flower 

Of real chivalry." 



METRICAL ROMANCES. 6$ 

All these romances, or at least romances on all these heroes, 
except Pleindamour, are still in existence ; and if they are the 
same, the parody cannot be said to depart far from the original. 
They deal with the usual subjects of romance — giants, enchant- 
ments, obstructive knights, and invincible champions — and their 
diction may fairly be described as unmitigated doggerel. The 
following two stanzas are from 'Lybeaus Disconus,' Le Beau 
Descofinu, The Fair Unknown (Ritson's Metrical Romances) : — 

" Anon that maid Helen 
Was set with knightes ten, 

Before Sir Lambard; 
She and the dwarf I mean, 
Told seven deedes keen, 

That he did thitherward. 
And how that Sir Lybeaus, 
Fought with fele shrews, 

And for no death ne spared: 
Lambard was glad and blithe 
And thankeden fele sith ^ 

God and St Edward. 

Anon with milde cheer 
They set to the supper 

With muche glee and game; 
Lambard and Lybeaus, in fere,'-^ 
Of aventures that there were 

Talked both in same. 
Then said Lybeaus, Sir Constable, 
Telleth me withouten fable, 

What is the knightes name, 
That holdeth so in prison 
The lady of Synadon 

That is so gentle a dame." 

All, or nearly all, English romances were translated from the 
French. In the case of a few unimportant ones, no French 
originals have been discovered, and they may therefore be pre- 
sumed to have been written in English to begin with ; but all the 
romances belonging to the great Arthurian cycle were originally 
composed in French, though some, if not most of them, by 
Englishmen for Anglo-Norman readers. 

The Romance of Ywain and Gawain, sons respectively of Urien, 
King of Gore, and Lot of Orkney, and nephews of Arthur, is 
ascribed by Ritson to the reign of Richard II. This romance is 
considerably superior to Horn Child or Lybeaus. The two 
cousins, and firm friends, are really noble mirrors of knighthood. 
Their prowess is supreme at Arthur's Court, and they are the 
very flowers of courtesy and generosity. Ywain (Ewen, or Owen) 

1 Many times. 2 in company. 



64 Chaucer's contemporaries. 

is the hero of the piece in so far that its object is to relate his 
adventures. He kills a fair lady's husband, marries her, rides 
away on promise of returning within a twelvemonth, is tempted 
by his love of tourneying to stay beyond his time, incurs his lady's 
fierce displeasure, goes mad, is restored to his wits, and, after 
many perils and successes, is reunited to the object of his faithful 
affections. The romance abounds in the marvels of its class. A 
knight-errant comes to a well of cold water, with a basin of gold 
hanging near ; he takes the basin and sprinkles some water on an 
emerald stone ; immediately there arises a furious tempest of hail, 
rain, snow, sleet, thunder, and scorching lightning. When the 
storm subsides, a flock of birds alight near him, and by-and-by 
comes a knight, with the sound of many horsemen, spurring on 
eagerly to do battle to the stranger, who has dared so to trouble 
the realm. Ywain's lady gives him an enchanted ring with various 
wonderful properties — 

" I shall leW to you anon 
The virtue that is in the stone: 
It is no prison shall you hold, 
All if your foes be many fold; 
"With sickness shall ye not be ta'en, 
Ne of your blood shall ye lose nana." 

One of the most striking wonders in the romance is the attach- 
ment of a lion to the person of Ywain. The knight had saved his 
life in an encounter with a dragon, and from that moment the 
royal beast becomes his faithful attendant and body-guard, and 
renders him very valuable service in his encounters. 

Though Ywain is the hero of the romance, his cousin Gawain is 
a still nobler and more illustrious figure. Ywain, indeed, when they 
are unawares matched against each other, fights with him through 
a whole long day till darkness sets in, without losing ground ; but 
Gawain is represented as the most famous of Arthur's knights, to 
whom the distressed naturally apply for succor. Gawain's fortune 
has been very hard in the growth and variation of Arthurian 
romance. Other heroes of later invention have been exalted 
at his expense. In the romance of Merlin,^ which is the chief 
authority for the early history of Arthur, Gawain is the noblest 
ideal of knighthood. Again and again the romance dwells upon 
his irresistible strength and generous disposition. King Bors 
says, that if he live he will be the most illustrious knight that 
ever was. He is "a wise knight, and without pride, and the most 
courteous that was in the Bloy Breteyne, and the best taught in 
all things, and ever true to God and to his lord." And, again, 

1 An English fifteenth-century version of this romance is published by the Early 
E-nglish Text Society. 



JOHN BARBOUR. 65 

he is said to be " one of the best knights and wisest of the world, 
and thereto the least mis-speaker and none avaunter, and the best 
taught of all things that longeth to worship or curtesy." But this 
reputation was too bright in the eyes of other romancers with 
heroes of their own to celebrate ; and so Gavvain was depreciated, 
that more unrivalled lustre might accrue to Lancelot, Pelleas, 
Lamorak, or Tristan. All these knights were brought into conflict 
with him, and came off victorious. Worse than that, the glory of 
his courtesy was tarnished by a base explanation. It was fabled 
that he was sworn to courteous behaviour as a punishment for a 
most unknighdy action done in his youth. And last of all came 
Lord Tennyson, and pursued the unfortunate knight with bitter 
hatred and spiteful detraction, because he was the half-brother 
(Lord Tennyson would say the full brother) of Mordred ; and it 
suited the laureate's purpose to argue that treachery, masked by 
smiling manners, ran in the blood.^ 



IL — Scottish Contemporaries. 

I. John Barbour {d. 1396). 

The impulse of mediaeval poetry had no very considerable effect 
on Scotland till the end of the fifteenth century. Not till then 
was there anything that could be called a flowering period of 
Scottish song. In the fourteenth century, however, there was a 
certain emulous response to the Continental singers : a response, 
too, that was inspired by no smaU ambition. The Scottish poets 
of the fourteenth century were not content to echo with or with- 
out variations the favourite romances of the west of Europe : they 
struck a bolder, a more original, a more closely patriotic note. 
Events had recently happened that fascinated them more than the 
most dazzHng achievements of the European models of knight- 
hood, and filled them with pride as weU as reverence. Alexander, 
Arthur, Charlemagne, were faint personages to them in compari- 
son with their own national heroes. Their country was fresh 
from a successful struggle to maintain her independence against 
English aggression ; and in the exultation of their triumphant re- 
sistance, they had no interest in weaving romantic webs of splen- 
did colours round ideal champions of other causes. Even the 
great cause of Christian against Saracen, in which the religious 
imagination of the Middle Ages had exhibited Alexander, as well 
as Arthur and Charlemagne, stirred them with a vaguer and 

1 National jealousy of the Scots may have had something to do with the degen- 
eration of Gawain in the romances. The romance of Ywain and Gawain is in the 
Northern dialect, 



66 Chaucer's contemporaries. 

feebler enthusiasm than memories of their own recent dehverance 
from impending slavery. And in the leaders of their war of 
independence, they were proud to be able to show to the world 
fresh mirrors of chivalry. They were not ashamed to place 
Douglas side by side with Hector of Troy, and to claim for Wal- 
lace and Bruce endless honour among the foremost heroes of 
romance. 

John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, who undertook to 
relate the exploits of the Bruce in four-accent couplets, was a 
scholar, an ardent patriot, and a warm admirer of chivalry. Zeal 
for study, both of books and of men, the enthusiasm of knowl- 
edge, may be said to be characteristic of the Scotch ; and Bar- 
bour was in this respect a Scot of the Scots. In 1357, when he 
had already attained the dignity of archdeacon, he applied to his 
king, David II., to procure him a passport from Edward III., 
and w^ent south with three scholars under his charge to study at 
Oxford. Again, in 1364, he obtained permission to "study at 
Oxford or elsewhere as he might think proper." In 1365, and 
again in 1368, he passed through England towards France to 
prosecute his studies in Paris. The terms of the safe-conducts 
granted to him show that he travelled not merely as the superin- 
tendent of the studies of youthful wards, but for the increase of his 
own knowledge.^ 

While thus devoted to the life contemplative, the life active had 
a strong hold of his imagination. " The heart of the soldier beat 
under the frock of the churchman." The spirit of chivalry found 
a fit dwelling-place in the grave Scotch student : nowhere did its 
attributes of courage, gentleness, generosity, fidelity, and high 
honour meet with a warmer reception, and nowhere was every- 
thing antagonistic to it excommunicated with heartier indignation. 
Believers in race will not fail to observe that Barbour was born in 
the north-east of Scotland, and that in the population of this dis- 
trict there was a large admixture of settlers from the opposite 
coasts of Norway and Denmark — men of the same race as the 
Norman founders of chivalry — so that the patriotic, warlike- 
minded churchman may have inherited from roving and reaving 
ancestors his passion for celebrating heroic achievements. At 
all events, race or no race, the passion was strong within him. 
He enters the battle with his hero, and lays about him with 
sturdy enthusiasm. The shock of Bruce's spear is irresistible ; 
and when his spear is shivered and his good sword drawn, there 
is death in every sweep of his arm : heads are smitten off, helmets 
cleft, shoulder-plated arms shorn away like corn before the scythe. 
He does not hesitate to oppose the Bruce single-handed to two 
hundred men, and bring him off victorious after much slaughter ; 
1 See Mr Innes's preface to the Spalding Club edition, 



JOHN BARBOUR. 6^ 

comparing this incomparable achievement with the defeat of fifty 
men by the hardy son of Tydeus. With what energy he recounts 
the discomfiture of the three gigantic Macindrossans, who at- 
tempted to take Robert ahve ! How thoroughly he enjoys the 
feat of the king in bringing the giant who has leapt on his horse 
behind him round from the crupper within reach of his deadly 
sword ! Our archdeacon had a most admiring eye for a strong 
arm. When the patriots, in the beginning of the enterprise, are 
rowing towards Cantyre as a safe winter retreat, he imagines 
crowds of spectators on the shore looking at them as they rise 
on the rowing-benches, and admiring the stalwart hands that 
were more familiar with the spear than with the oar. Sir Walter 
Scott must have envied his description of the doughty Douglas — 

" But he was not so fair that we, 
Should speak greatly of his beauty. 
In visage was he somedeal grey, 
And had black hair as I heard say; 
But of limbes he was well made, 
With bones great and shoulders braid; ^ 

When he was blithe he was lovely, 
And meek and sweet in company; 
But who in battle might him see, 
All other countenance had he." 

This trim carpet-knight and grim champion had the noblest 
attribute of strength — generosity. When Bruce sent him to help 
outnumbered Randolph at Bannockburn, he halted when he saw 
the enemy begin to give way, that he might not rob his friend of 
any part of the honour of success. 

But courage was not the only chivalrous virtue that the Scot- 
tish poet of chivalry held in admiration. There are other elements 
in his portrait of Douglas — 

" He was in all his deedes leal,^ 
For him dedeigned not to deal, 
With treachery ne with falset. 
His heart on high honour was set, 
And him contained in such manner 
That all him loved that were him near." 

This disdain of falsehood Barbour was prepared to practise as 
well as to admire. He held it to be his duty to give impartial 
praise to brave achievements — 

" But whether so he be friend or foe 
That winnes prize of chivalry, 
Men should speak thereof lealely." 



1 Broad. ^ Faithful — loyal. 



68 Chaucer's contemporaries. 

And he scrupulously fulfilled the obligation in his own case. We 
may be certain that he added only the attractions of rhyme to the 
traditional glory of his hero ; and he does not fail to recognise and 
honour a valiant enemy. He duly records and extols the mag- 
nanimity of Sir Giles de Argentine in raising his battle-cry and 
rushing to certain death rather than leave the field of Bannock- 
burn alive. Nor is Barbour deficient in apprehending the chival- 
rous respect for women. He particularly commends the sturdy 
Douglas for his assiduity in hunting and fishing for the ladies of 
the party when their fortunes were at the lowest. And Bruce 
himself is almost Quixotic in his devotion to the tender sex. On 
a critical occasion he delays the march of his army rather than 
imperil the safety of a poor laundress in his train. No act on 
record of any knight of romance can exceed that : it is as incom- 
parable a proof of his tenderness as the combat with two hun- 
dred is of his courage and strength. 

The enthusiastic Pinkerton preferred Barbour, ''taking the 
total merits of the work together, ... to the melancholy sub- 
limity of Dante, and the amorous quaintness of Petrarca ; " and 
every Scotchman whose patriotism would be above suspicion must 
wish that he could agree with Pinkerton. There is, indeed, a 
certain epic swing and momentum about the romance of the 
Bruce ; its vigorous opening picture of the prostration of Scotland 
under the English, and its passionate aspiration after freedom, 
place a powerful arrest on the wandering attention, and summon 
us with no small cogency to hear the story of enfranchisement 
through its ups and downs of hope and danger to the triumphant 
end. If he had stopped with the battle of Bannockburn, Bar- 
bour's Bruce might have been called a historical epic, bearing to 
the epic proper the same relation that the chronicle history bears 
to the regular drama. But by carrying his story on to the death 
of Bruce, he conforms it to the laws of the metrical romance, 
which, doubtless, were the laws that he set himself to observe, and 
very likely the only laws known to him. The manners and senti- 
ments, as we have seen, are those of chivalry. Barbour was a 
distinct observer, and he had the consistent, pure, defined senti- 
ments of a clear-headed man, careful always to establish a harmony 
between the sentiment and the object. There is not much em- 
bellishment in his style. He presents us with but few studies of 
natural scenery, and those bare and meagre ; and he draws no 
extended portraits of the beautiful women that moved among and 
commanded the homage of his brave men. His diction rises con- 
siderably above the rude doggerel of rhyming chronicles ; he is 
superior to the necessities of make-rhymes. Undoubtedly, how- 
ever, the main charm of Barbour's Bruce lies in the cordial energy 
of its battles and rencounters. 



HENRY THE MINSTREL. 69 

2. Henry the Minstrel, " Blind Harry." 

The champion of the fame of WilHam Wallace, was born at least 
half a century later than Barbour. One does not like to say 
severe things about a poor old wandering minstrel. Like many 
other bygones that were interesting to bygones, he and his heroic 
verse, once an acceptable arrival at many a lively feast and proud 
residence, would be considered a terrible visitation in modern 
society. Blind Harry has not the elements of perennial interest. 
Only strong patriotism could have composed, and only strong 
patriotism could have listened to, his strains. Till very recendy, 
however, he was popular among the Scottish peasantry, circulating 
no longer in oral recitation,' but in printed copies, often boardless 
and well-thumbed. Of late he has been superseded by Miss 
Porter's 'Scottish Chiefs.' 

III. — English Successors. 

It does no great violence to fact to treat all the English poets of 
the fifteenth century as the disciples of Chaucer. Almost every- 
thing of value in the poetry of that century — and not much has 
been preserved, if there was much to preserve — was due to the 
impulse given by Chaucer. A great deal of versification went on 
out of the reach of that impulse, in the shape of chronicles, lives 
of saints, translations from the French, and other miscellaneous 
lines. Prose romances also were translated. But the two or three 
poets that rise above the herd had, or professed to have, an ac- 
quaintance with Chaucer, and acknowledged allegiance to him, 
though all of them were far from catching any tincture of the 
charm of his verse. It is, indeed, significant of the general dulness 
of ear, as well as poverty of execution, that Skelton places Govver 
and Lydgate on the same level with the master from whose great- 
ness to their littleness is such a fathomless sheer descent. 

The extraordinary collapse of English poetry after the death of 
Chaucer is one of the most curious phenomena in literary history. 
When he died he carried his mantle with him ; or at least it fell 
upon no worthy successor in England. We have to look to the 
Scottish Court for any memorable traces of his influence. A 
Chaucerian school was established in Scotland, and flourished 
there for nearly two centuries, decaying only with the transference 
of the Stuart dynasty to London. But in England itself his exam- 
ple fell dead, and there was no stirring of poetical vitality till 

1 I remember, however, a sturdy beggar of the name of Wallace, who was 
much revered by schoolboys as a lineal descendant from the national hero, and 
who used to recite from "Blind Harrv" violent incidents, such r.3 the biealrirg 
of the churl's back, with appiopnate gesticulation. 



70 CHAUCER S SUCCESSORS. 

poetry came under new influences. The wide literary desert cor- 
responds with an inglorious pohtical interval, and it is usual to 
connect the two as effect and cause. The Wars of the Roses, more 
particularly, are commonly held responsible for the decadence of 
English poetry in the fifteenth century. But this current explana- 
tion will not bear looking at, even if we give a wide meaning to 
the Wars of the Roses, so as to include all the long-protracted 
struggle of the House of Lancaster to keep itself in power. The 
state of affairs was disturbed, but not more so than it had been 
in Chaucer's time, A poet's audience, before the invention of 
printing, was necessarily limited, but a poet of genius would have 
found an audience even in the reign of Henry VI. Abundant 
patronage was given to inferior artificers; the poet was in no 
danger of having his genius chilled by indifference. Men's minds 
are never wholly engrossed even by such national calamities as 
unsettled succession and civil war. Some of the sweetest and 
lightest love-poetry in our language was published during the heat 
of the Great Rebellion. Tottel's ' Miscellany,' with its songs and 
sonnets fragrant of sweet marjoram, as the publisher put it, 
found eager purchasers in the reign of Bloody Mary. The reign 
of Richard H. was one of the darkest periods in English history, 
yet it was in this reign that Chaucer wrote his * Canterbury Tales.' 
The immense expansion of England in the eighteenth century has 
no counterpart in its literature. Instances might be multiplied 
to show that the connection between poetry and public affairs is 
by no means so close as it is the fashion to assert. The influence 
of social conditions and political events is accidental rather than 
essential. It may convey germs of poetic life to virgin soil, 
but it cannot originate new forms ; it may fertilise and foster, 
but it can neither generate nor prevent decay. The main causes 
of literary developments and literary degenerations must be sought 
for in literature itself, and in the individual characters of men of 
letters. 

I. Thomas Occleve (i 370-1430?). 

Of the immediate successors of Chaucer, the most celebrated is 
Lydgate ; but Occleve, or Hoccleve, comes first in order of time. 
It is to Occleve that we owe our standard portrait of Chaucer. 
He was a most ardent and admiring disciple of the great poet, and 
more than once lamented him in such strains as these, extolling 
his knowledge in rhetoric, philosophy, and poetry, and inveighing 
against the indiscriminate ravages of death — 

" O master clear and father reverent, 
My master Chaucer, flower of eloquence, 
Mirror of fructuous intendement ! 



THOMAS OCCLEVE. 7I 

O universal father in science, 

Alas, that thou thine excellent prudence 

In thy bed mortal mightest not bequeathe ! 

What ailed Death, alas ! why would he slay thee? 

O Death, thou didest not harm singular 

In slaughter of him, but all this land it smarteth ! 

But, natheless, yet hast thou no power 

His name to slay : his high virtue astarteth 

Unslain from thee, which aye vis lifely hearteth 

With bookes of his ornate inditing, 

That is to all this land enlumining." 

And again — 

*' She might have tarried her vengeance a while 
Till that some man had equal to thee be. 
Nay, let be that ! she knew well that this isle 
May never man bring forthe like to thee. 
And her office needes do mote she; 

God bade her do so, I trust for the best. 

O master, master, God thy soule rest ! " 

In Thynne's edition of Chaucer, in 1532, there was printed, 
among other miscellaneous pieces, a " Letter of Cupid," written 
in 1402. No other production ascribed to Occleve appeared in 
print for more than two hundred years ; and after Warton charac- 
terised him as a feeble poet of cold genius, the very titles of whose 
poems were chilling to the searchers after invention and fancy, 
the unfortunate poet ran a considerable risk of extinction. In 
1 796, however, George Mason printed various poems from an MS. 
that Warton had not seen, and pleaded for a more favourable 
verdict. 

Occleve is certainly an interesting character, if not an interest- 
ing poet. " Cold " was a singularly inappropriate word to apply 
to him. He seems to have been a fellow of infinite warmth and 
geniality. He is supposed to have been born in 1370, and he 
emerges at the Court of Richard II. in 1387. The luxurious 
extravagance of that Court found in him a congenial spirit. He 
could never pass the sign of Bacchus, with its invitation to thirsty 
passengers to moisten their clay, so long, at least, as he had any- 
thing in his purse ; and he spent much money in the temples of a 
goddess of still more questionable character. He was a favourite 
among cooks and taverners, from the circumstance that he always 
paid them what they asked. Only two men of his acquaintance 
could equal him in drinking at night and lying in bed in the 
morning. The only thing that preserved his life from the brawls 
incident to such habits was an invincible cowardice : he never 
traduced men except in a whisper. All this we know from his 



72 CHAUCER S SUCCESSORS. 

own humorous confessions. He tells us also that his excesses 
exhausted his money, although he held a valuable office — and 
impaired his health, though nature had given him a strong con- 
stitution. He would seem to have received a pension of twenty 
marks a-year from Henry IV., and various begging poetical ad- 
dresses are extant to show that he suffered from a chronic scarcity 
of coin. In the introduction to his poem Dc Reginiine Pri7ici- 
puni ("On the Government of Princes," written in 141 1 or 141 2), 
he relates his distressed circumstances, and how an old man had 
advised him to write a work and dedicate it to Prince Henry, 
who might perhaps be induced thereby at least to see that his 
annuity was regularly paid. There would seem to have been not 
a little of Falstaff in his character. He addressed a poem to Sir 
John Oldcastle, full of grave disputation, w^hich receives a some- 
what mock-serious air from his advice to the good knight to leave 
off studying Holy Writ, and read * Launcelot of the Lake,' or 
' Vegetius,' or ' The Siege of Troy,' confining his Bible reading, if 
he must read the Bible, to Judges, Kings, Joshua, Judith, the 
Chronicles, and the Maccabees, all of which are most authentic 
and pertinent to chivalry. Although he had been appointed a 
writer to the Privy Seal, probably in 1387,^ his hopes were long 
set on obtaining a benefice in the Church, but at last he married 
in despair. In the beginning of the reign of Henry VI,, he wrote 
an appeal for pecuniary help to Carpenter, afterwards Bishop of 
Worcester ; and unless his conduct was more respectable in his 
later years, when seventy winters had passed over his head, this 
petition must be taken as being very much of a piece with Fal- 
staffs application for a loan to the Lord Chief-Justice. His l^st 
patron seems to have been the Duke of York ; and he lived to the 
good old age of eighty, having contrived probably to pass through 
life very easily, from his success in conciliating patronage, and in 
borrowing without repaying. 

The " Letter of Cupid " is full of sly humour and tender feeling. 
It is addressed by Cupid to all his subjects, to warn them of the 
grievous complaints that have been made to him by ladies of 
honour and reverence concerning the deceitful outrages and of- 
fences done them by men. They complain particularly of the 
little island of Albion, — 

1 This is the most probable date, and the date also of Occleve's coming to 
Court. In his "Address to Health," Occleve speaks of twenty years of misspent 
life ; in his De Regimine Principum, he speaks of having been a writer to the 
Privy Seal for " twenty years and four come Easter." The date of the one poem 
is supposed to be 1406, and of the other 1412; but the circumstances make 1407 
and 1411 equally probable ; and if we accept these dates with an interval of four 
years between the two compositions, it becomes likely that Occleve's memory 
went back to the same date as the beginning of his dissipation and his official 
appointment. The date of the appointment is usually given as 1392, from a curious 
mistake of " twenty years and four " for twenty. 



I 



THOMAS OCCLEVE. 73 

*' Passing all landes on the little isle 
That cleped is Albion they must complain. 
They say that there is crop and root of guile 
So can the men dissimulen and feign, 
With standing droppes in their eyen twain 
When that their heartes feeleth no distress 
To blinden women with their doubleness. 

Their wordes spoken be so sighingly 

With so piteous a cheer and countenance, 

That every wight that meaneth truely 

Deemeth they in heart haven such grievance. 

They say so importable is their penance 

That but their lady lust to show them grace 
They right anon must sterven in the place. 

Ah, lady mine, they say, I you ensure, 

As doth me grace, and I shall ever be, 

While that my life may lasten and endure, 

To you as humble and low in each degree 

As possible is, and keep all things in secre. 
Right as yourselven listeth that I (]o, 
And else mine hearte mote brast in two." 

This is what the wicked men do ; and Cupid deeply compassion- 
ates the injured women — 

" O faithful woman, full of innocence. 
Thou art deceived by false apparence." 

He proceeds to show how men overcome silly, simple, innocent 
women, and then go and boast of their success ; he asks them, Is 
this an honourable vaunt ? To be sure, men say that women are 
unfaithful — but what is this but envy and pique at failure to 
achieve their infamous designs ? Granted that here and there may 
be found a woman unfaithful : did not some of the angels fall, and 
was not one of the apostles a traitor? Cupid then administers a 
severe rebuke to men that slander women, bidding them think of 
their own mothers — 

" Oh, every man ought have an hearte tender 
To a woman and deem her honourable, 
Whether his shape be thick or elles slender, 
Or he be good or bad. It is no fable. 
Every wight wote that wit hath reasonable. 

That of a woman he descended is; 

Then is it shame of her to speak amiss. 

A wicked tree good fruit may none forth bring. 

For such the fruit is aye as is the tree; 

Take heed of whom thou took thy beginning. 

Let thy mother be mirror unto thee, 

Honour her, if thou wolte honoured be. 
Despiseth her then not in no manner, 
Lest that thereby thy wickedness appear." 



74 CHAUCER S SUCCESSC R«5. 

It is a fashion with poets whenever they mention women to rail 
at them, and rake up the stories of Adam, David, Samson, and 
Solomon ; this, says Cupid, is a tyranny that he will not permit, 
and is exercised chiefly by worn-out old scoundrels who try to 
discredit what they can no longer enjoy. He threatens to punish 
them by making them maugre their will fall in love with " the 
foulest slut in all the town," and extol her as a duchess or a 
queen. He refers to the ' Romance of the Rose ' as a manual of 
the arts of love, and says it is no wonder though women prove 
unfaithful when men assail them with such craft. He draws 
unfavourable contrasts between Jason and Medea, yEneas and 
Dido. He even defends Eve : it was her trusting confiding 
nature that induced her to believe the serpent ; no thought of 
guile entered her mind ; only a man, himself accustomed to deceit, 
would have suspected any harm. Finally, he bids men honour 
women for the sake of the Virgin Mary, who next to God is man's 
best friend, at whose girdle hangs the key of mercy ; and com- 
mends the fidelity of women to Christ when men forsook Him, 
and the heroism of female martyrs. 

The De Regimine Principum, translated from ^gidius, with an 
original introduction in the form of a dialogue between the author 
and an old man, is a didactic poem on the duties of the king, 
involving the discussion of domestic and foreign relations. There 
are some faint traces of Occleve's jocularity in the opening 
dialogue. He is very rich in one thing, and that is indigence. 
Some people complain of Fortune as my Lady Changeable : she 
is too much my Lady Steadfast and Stable with him, for she keeps 
him constantly in poverty. These, however, are rare touches of 
light in the sombre didactic, which is simply rhymed politics, of 
interest only to the political historian. Occleve belongs to the 
numerous class of abuse-mongers : an easy trade, and nothing but 
a mechanical trade to a man of his temperament. He asks where 
pity is gone, that so many gentlemen who spent their substance in 
the wars with France now go about in poverty ; inveighs against 
the degeneracy of knights, who fight not for honour as in the old 
time, l)ut for gain ; attacks the clergy for their desire of pluralities, 
and their stingy neglect of church roof and altar ; laments the 
necessity of propitiating men of power in the courts of law ; con- 
demns infantine betrothals, the abundance of paramours, and the 
lack of conjugal fidelity. His advice to the king, Henry V., 
Falstaffs Hal, is all very sound, and all very commonplace. 
Perhaps the most striking of his precepts is his deprecation of 
the wars between France and England. Christian princes should 
not make war on each other ; they should combine against the 
infidel. Henry should make peace by marriage. All this might 
be very creditable to honest Thomas's humanity, were it not to be 



JOHN LYDGATE. 75 

suspected that he had got wind of this basis of peace-making as 
a thing in contemplation. At least, however, let him have the 
credit of concurring ; and let us hope that Henry took in good 
part another hint of a more personal nature — that he should never 
grant pensions unless he meant to pay them. 

2. John Lydgate (1370- 1450?). 

One expects to find in Lydgate, v/ho belonged to the Churchy 
a supreme exponent of saintly ideals. But though the Monk of 
Bury wrote several lives of saints, he was not so much a religious 
enthusiast as a professional poet, with facile pen at the command 
of many patrons for many different purposes. 

Lydgate is the most celebrated of the successors of Chaucer, 
and for more than a century after his death almost divided the 
honours of poetry with his great master. Later posterity, how- 
ever, has not confirmed this reputation ; and it is but justice to 
him to say that he himself made no pretension to the high rank 
accorded him by his own and several following generations. If 
the "Flower of Courtesy" is his, the ending is a modest and fair 
estimate of his powers ; and if it should turn out not to be his, 
other passages no less modest may be produced from his undoubted 
compositions. It runs thus — 

" Ever as I can surprisen in mine heart, 

Alway with fear, betwixen dread and shame, 

Lest out of lose! any word should astart 

In this metre, to make it seemen lame. 

Chaucer is dead, which that had such a name 
Of fair making, that was vvithouten ween"^ 
Fairest in our tongue as the laurer green. 

We may assayen for to counterfeit 
His gaye style, but it nill not ybe; 
The well is dry, with the liquor so sweet 
Both of Clio and of Calliope; 
And first of all I will excusen me 

To her that is the ground of goodlihed, 

And thus I say unto her womanhead." 

It would be ungenerous to take the poet at his own modest esti- 
mate, framed in accordance with the poetical etiquette of his time, 
were it not that still more unfavourable estimates have been given 
by some modern critics. Percy, Ritson, and Pinkerton treat him 
with contempt : Ritson, in particular, scoffing at " these stupid and 
fatiguing productions, and their still more stupid and disgusting 
author." Even after he had been vindicated by Warton, the editor 
of 'A Chronicle of London' quoted some of his poems with the 

1 Order. 2 Doubt. 



^6 Chaucer's successors. 

remark, ''It seems no subject escaped that eternal scribbler's atten- 
tion." Now, although his verses, as they have come down to us, 
are often intolerably lame, let us, out of respect for the judgment 
of our ancestors, see what good can be said of the sum total of his 
literary exertions. Seeing that Warton is his most indulgent 
critic,^ it may be well to let Warton speak for him as much as 
possible, leaving severe and exacting criticism to make what deduc- 
tions it thinks proper. 

If Lydgate is deficient in quality, he makes up in quantity. 
He was a most indefatigable and versatile poet. In 1598, Speght 
enumerated 114 different pieces, original and translated, ascribed 
to Lydgate ; and Ritson, it 1782, was able to bring the number up 
to 251. Speght's catalogue embraces Lydgate's three principal 
works — The "Siege of Thebes;" " Bochas upon the Fall of 
Princes : at the Commandment of Humphrey, Duke of Glouces- 
ter ; " "The History, Siege, and Destruction of Troy : at Command- 
ment of K. Henry the Fifth, 141 2," — followed by a strangely 
heterogeneous assortment of psalms, hymns, calendars, pedigrees, 
lives of saints, moral allegories, prayers, astrological and philosophi- 
cal memoranda, popular ballads, disguisings, mummings, and direct 
moral exhortations. The best known of his minor poems are " The 
Dance of Death " and the " London Lackpenny." " No poet 
seems to have possessed a greater versatility of talents. He moves 
with equal ease in every mode of composition. His hymns and 
his ballads have the same degree of merit ; and whether his subject 
be the life of a hermit or a hero, of Saint Austin or Guy Earl of 
Warwick, ludicrous or legendary, religious or romantic, a history or 
an allegory, he writes with facility. His transitions were rapid, 
from works of the most serious and laborious kind, to sallies of 
levity and pieces of popular entertainment. His muse was of 
universal access ; and he was not only the poet of his monastery, 
but of the world in general. If a disguising was intended by the 
company of goldsmiths, a mask before his majesty at Eltham, a 
May-game for the sheriff and aldermen of London, a mumming 
before the lord mayor, a procession of pageants from the creation 
for the festival of Corpus Christi, or a carol for th^ coronation, 
Lydgate was consulted, and gave the poetry." 

We may, then, consider Lydgate as a facile and accomplished 
versifier, with a flexible wealth of second-hand poetical beauties : 
if his own imagination was superseded by wide knowledge and 
fluency, he at least was able to put the imaginations of others 
under judicious exactions. He cultivated poetry as the Greek 
rhetoricians are said to have cultivated rhetoric. He came after a 
long line of Middle Age poets who had discovered and refined all 

1 See also an eloquent tribute to the old poet in Professor Morley's English 
Writers, ii. 424. 



JOHN LYDGATE. 77 

the nuggets of their peculiar mine. The ItaHan and the French 
poets had exhausted the commonplaces, and Chaucer had carried 
away all the best of the new vein of English life and manners. A 
very original genius might have been powerful enough to open a 
new mine, though it may be doubted whether the time was then 
ripe for it : but Lydgate's genius was pliant and obsequious, and 
he contented himself with selecting and fusing into new combina- 
tions the refined gold of his predecessors. " After a short educa- 
tion at Oxford, he travelled into France and Italy, and returned a 
complete master of the language and the literature of both coun- 
tries. He chiefly studied the Italian and French poets, particularly 
Dante, Boccaccio, and Alain Chartier ; and became so distinguished 
a proficient in polite learning, that he opened a school in his mon- 
astery for teaching the sons of the nobility the arts of versification 
and the elegancies of composition." 

The " Flower of Courtesy," from which we have already quoted, 
whether Lydgate's or not, is a fair illustration of his manner as a 
hack versifier. It is written in Troilus verse — Lydgate's favour- 
ite metre, which he used with wooden indifference for all sorts 
of subjects — and is a eulogy of the wondrous beauty and many 
virtues of a lady, an expert recombination of the chief common- 
places of enamoured praise. She is as the sun among the stars, 
the sovereign ruby among rich stones, the sweet rose among fresh 
flowers ; she is in all truth and soberness (soothfastness) the fairest 
and the best of her sex, a pattern of steadfastness, a mirror of 
seemliness ; she is " of port benign and wonder glad of cheer," 
discreet and wise, with all her desires governed by wit and high 
prudence ; her busy charge is virtue ; she is the consolation of the 
sick and the enemy of slander ; there is no changing nor double- 
ness in her. Her poet is rude ; he has not the skill to describe her 
praises ; he knows no rhetoric. She is good as Polyxena, fair as 
Helen, steadfast as Dorigen, constant and faithful as Cleopatra ; 
citron (bright of hue) as the white Antigone of Troy ; meek as 
Hester, prudent as Judith, kind as Alcestis, patient as Griselda, 
discreet as Ariadne, honest as Lucrece, faithful as Penelope, fair as 
Phyllis, innocent as Hypsipyle, seemly as Canace, &c., &c. 

One of his mechanical arts is rather curious. In his narratives 
he seems to intersperse descriptive and moralising passages at short 
intervals for the deliberate purpose of agreeably breaking the march 
of events. It is not probable that the intervals are studiously 
regular ; but it does seem as if, after a considerable reach of 
narrative, he took counsel with himself and said — " It is time now 
that we had a break ; I must seize the first opportunity." What 
begets this suspicion is the fact that he occasionally seems to make 
such opportunities, when they do not occur naturally. 

His abundant command of poetical language and imagery betrays 



yS Chaucer's successors. 

him into diffuseness and pleonastic accumulation. This is the vice 
of his position as the heir of many generations of creative poets. 
Inheriting vast poetical wealth, he spends it prodigally ; he does 
not refine his rich inheritance with tasteful activity, but enjoys the 
easy luxurious pleasure of telling out and heaping up his glittering 
hoards. We spoke of his fusing into new combinations, but very 
often he simply accumulates. This appears particularly in official 
pieces rapidly made to order. Take for example his description of 
the seven attendants in the pageant of Nature, Grace, and Fortune, 
set forth in a poem upon the reception of Henry VI. in London 
after his coronation as King of France, 1429^ — 

" On the right hand of these Emperesses, 
Stood seven maidenes very celestial; 
Like Phoebus' beames shone their golden tresses, 
Upon their heads each having a crownal, 
Of port and cheere seeming immortal : 
In sight transcending all earthly creatures, 
So angelic they vveren of their figures. 

All clad in white, in token of cleanness, 
Like pure virgines as in their ententes, 
Showing outward an heavenly fresh brightness; 
Streamed with sunnes weren all their garmentes : 
Afore provided for pure innocentes : 
Most columbine of cheer and of looking, 
Meekly rose up at the coming of the king." 

This is doggerel five-piled, though the elements thus mechani- 
cally piled up were originally exquisite. It is, however, an 
extreme example, and perhaps when Lydgate falls to be edited, 
it may be shown that this rude stuff is unworthy of him. Mr 
Wright ascribes to him an address to the boy-king on the same 
occasion, very little superior, it must be confessed, Jn work- 
manship. 

What chiefly recommended him to his contemporaries was, we 
may conjecture, his narrative vigour; or, generally, his quali- 
fications for writing a serious epic. Chaucer being so much the 
servant of the comic muse, with an eye for the humorous, the 
pathetic, and the picturesque, in familiar life and manners, the 
moment was singulariy opportune for a poet prepared to deal 
with the darker side of life and the weightier incidents of national 
or civic history. Lydgate himself might not have se'en the open- 
ing : the versatile monk .was probably fully occupied with mis- 
cellaneous orders for hymns, prayers, lives of saints, and dis- 
guisings — too busy or too contented to look beyond his orders, 
except in an occasional popular ballad for relaxation. But a 

1 Attributed to him in Mr. Halliwell's edition of his Minor Poems for the Percy 
Society. Quoted also as his in ' A Chronicle of London.' 



JOHN LYDGATE. 79 

tragic epic was suggested to him by a noble patron ; it was at 
the gracious command of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester — a royal 
minister sensible of the insecurity of his own position — that 
Lydgate undertook to translate " Boccaccio's Fall of Princes," a 
collection of short poems like the Monk's tragedies in the ' Canter- 
bury Tales.' The work was undertaken to satisfy a thirst for 
tragical recital ; and it fulfilled that mission till superseded by the 
fruits of the next great poetical season. It was sufficiently com- 
prehensive in its catalogue of unfortunate celebrities ; it travelled 
downwards through all history, sacred and profane, known to the 
author, from Adam and Eve to John, King of France, and his 
misfortune at Poictiers in 1356. 

Lydgate had no special call to tragic poetry. He had neither 
depth nor refinement of poetical feeling. But he had abundance 
of poetical language, and he was able to express the conceptions 
of his original in a style not so very unworthy. His " gigantic 
and monstrous image of Fortune " is quoted by Warton as an 
example of " Gothic greatness " : — 

" While Bochas pensive stood in his library, 
"With cheer oppressed, pale in his visage, 
Some deal abashed, alone and solitary; 
To him appeared a monstruous image, 
Parted in twain of colour and courage, 
Her rights side full of summer flowers, 
The tother oppressed with winter stormy showers. 

Bochas astonied, full fearful to abraid,^ 
When he beheld the wonderful figure 
Of P^ortune, thus to himself he said : 
' What may this mean? Is this a creature. 
Or a monster transformed again nature. 
Whose burning even sparkle of their light 
As do the stars the frosty winter night?' 

And of her cheere full good heed he took; 

Her face seeming cruel and terrible, 

And by disdaine menacing of look; 

Her hair untrussed, hard, sharp, and horrible, 

Froward of shape, loathesome and odible -.'^ 

An hundred hands she had of each a part,^ 

In sundry wise her giftes to depart.^ 

Some of her handes lift up men aloft, 
To high estate of worldly dignity; 
Another hande griped full unsoft. 
Which cast another in great adversity. 
Gave one richesse, another poverty." 

According to Warton, our poet's chief excellence is in florid 
description. He is very gorgeous in his architecture ; giving to 

1 Rise. 2 Hateful. 3 On each side. ■* Distribute. 



8o Chaucer's successors. 

Greeks and Trojans all the magnificence of Gothic masonry. The 
following passage from Warton illustrates this peculiarity, and, 
at the same time, the absurdity of his anachronisms : " The poet 
(following Colonna) supposes that Hector was buried in the prin- 
cipal church of Troy, near the high altar, within a magnificent 
oratory, erected for that purpose, exactly resembling the Gothic 
shrines of our cathedrals, yet charged with many romantic decora- 
tions. 

" * With crafty arches raised wonder clean, 

Embowered over all the work to cure. 

So marvellous was the celature, 

That all the roof and closure environ, 

Was of fine gold y-plated up and down, 

With knottes graven wonder curious 

Fret full of stones rich and precious.' 

" The structure is supported by angels of gold. The steps are 
of crystal. Within, is not only an image of Hector in solid gold ; 
but his body embalmed, and exhibited to view with the resemblance 
of real life, by means of a precious liquor circulating through 
every part in golden tubes artificially disposed, and operating on 
the principles of vegetation. This is from the chemistry of the 
times. Before the body were four inextinguishable lamps in 
golden sockets. To complete the work, Priam founds a regular 
chantry of priests, whom he accommodates with mansions near 
the church, and endows with revenues, to sing in this oratory 
for the soul of his son Hector." Lydgate's contemporaries doubt- 
less enjoyed these descriptions, at a time when their senses were 
being opened to similar splendours in the churches, monasteries, 
and public buildings of their own towns and villages. Even 
to modern readers, in spite of their " capricious incredibilities 
and absurd inconsistencies," they are not without a certain charm 
of barbaric magnificence. 

The particulars of Lydgate's " florid landscapes " are picked 
and chosen from hundreds of preceding artists. We have the 
newe green, and the younge green, the soft blowing of Zephyrus, 
the sweet dew, the soft showers, the wholesome balm, the lustie 
licour, the tapestry of divers flowers in the meadows, the singing 
of birds, the glancing of leaves in the sunshine. " The colouring 
of our poet's mornings is often remarkably rich and splendid," 
says Warton ; and quotes the following : — 

" When that the rowes and the rayes red 
Eastward to us full early ginnen spread, 
Even at the twilight in the dawning, 
When that the lark of custom ginneth sing, 
For to saluten in her heavenly lay 
The lusty goddess of the morrow gray, 



SIR THOMAS MALORY. 

I mean x\urora, which afore the sun 
Is wont t' enchase the blacke skyes dun, 
And all the darkness of the dimmy night, 
And fresh Phcebus, with comfort of his light, 
And with the brightness of his beanies sheen, 
Hath overgilt the huge hilles green, 
And floweres eke, again the morrow tide, 
Upon their stalks gan plain their leaves wide." 



3. Sir Thomas Malory. 

The date of Caxton's print of Malory's ' Morte d'Arthur ' is 
1485, the year of the deposition of Richard III., and the final 
settlement of the strife between the Houses of York and Lan- 
caster. From the prime of Lydgate's life (1420-30) to this date, 
is a long interval, during which the Enghsh muse contented her- 
self with very humble efforts at poetry. Rhyme and metre were 
used rather plentifully for chronicles, moral treatises (translated 
from Latin), chivalrous romances, lives of saints, by such versifiers 
as John Harding, William of Nassington, Benedict Burgh, Hugh 
Campden, Thomas Chester ; but none of their performances rise 
to the humblest grade of mediocrity. 

Sir Thomas Malory's ' Morte d'Arthur ' is a condensation of an 
extensive literature — the prose romances on the subject of Arthur 
and the Knights of the Round Table. Its humble prose is all 
that we have to show as a national epic. It is compiled and 
abridged from French prose romances written during the thir- 
teenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, and contains the most 
famous exploits fabled of our national heroes. Its chief pretence 
to unity is that it begins with the birth of Arthur and ends with 
his death. It is, furthur, consistent in recognising throughout the 
invincible superiority of Lancelot of the Lake. Otherwise, its 
variety is somewhat bewildering, in spite of the obliging printer's 
division into twenty-one books. It is a book to choose when 
restricted to one book, and only one, as the companion of solitude ; 
there might then be some hope of gaining a clear mastery over its 
intricacies, a vivid conception of each several adventure of Gawain 
and his brothers, of Pelinore, Lancelot, Pelleas, Tristram, Pala- 
mides, Lamorak, Percival, Galahad, and their interminable friends, 
foes, and fair ladies. 

Lord Tennyson's " Idylls of the King " have drawn especial at- 
tention to Malory in this generation. The old knight is very pleas- 
ant reading. He describes warlike encounters with great spirit 
and graphic homely language ; and his simple old English is very 
telling in the record of such pathetic incidents as the unhappy love 
of the maid of Astolat. His work being more or less of an abridg- 
ment, he is obliged to sacrifice much of the picturesque detail of his 



82 Chaucer's successors. 

originals, and the story sometimes becomes a catalogue of encoun- 
ters, with but little variation of the familiar incidents of knights 
hurled over their horses' tail, swords flashed out, shields lifted high, 
and helmets struck with stunning blow. Yet the 'Morte d'Arthur' 
is, as it was designed to be, a most entertaining book. 

Lord Tennyson has taken considerable liberties in his adaptation 
of the legends or fictions collected by Malory. This he was fully 
entitled to do : there is nothing sacred in them, and an artist may 
do with them as he pleases, bearing always the responsibility of 
treating the subject in such a way as to justify, himself. So far 
from being offended at any modification of the story of the ' Morte 
d'Arthur,' we should owe no gratitude to a modern poet who 
should simply versify Malory's prose, whether in substance or in 
detail. We can have no quarrel with a modern poet for using the 
* Morte d'Arthur' as so much raw material to be worked at discre- 
tion. It is vain to look for any profound and consistent unity in 
such a compilation of the unconcerted labours of different authors 
— authors working not only without concert, but even with con- 
flicting aims. And therefore I think that Mr Hutton, in his 
eloquent defence of the " Idylls of the King " ^ from the strictures 
of Mr Swinburne, commits a mistake when he tries to make out 
that Lord Tennyson's conception of the story is more consonant 
with the original designs than Mr Swinburne's. Lord Tennyson 
is fully entitled to bend the story to his own purposes ; and Mr 
Hutton is much more happy in his interpretation and justification 
of the Idylls upon their independent merits. 

What the laureate has really done, has been to take up one 
motive to the creation of Arthur, and to regenerate his whole life 
in rigorous conformity thereto. This generating or regenerating 
motive is considerably different from any of the several motives 
that produced the heterogeneous character of the ' Morte d'Arthur,' 
but it may be said to be the modern and idylhc equivalent of one 
of them. So far, the character and achievements of Arthur may 
be described with Mr Hutton as a " mystic medieval vision." 
There is a certain '' halo of spiritual glory " round Arthur's head. 
He ministered to other sentiments than religious enthusiasm : he 
was a mirror of perfect knighthood, an object of national pride, 
and the adventures of himself and his knights furnished a luxuri- 
ous feast to the passion for the marvellous. But religious enthu- 
siasm was undoubtedly one motive, and a great motive, for his 
creation. He was the champion of Christianity against the 
heathen, and his return was looked for to aid in the recovery of 
the Holy Cross. And it is this side of Arthur's character that 
Lord Tennyson has set himself to treat in his own way. His Arthur 

1 Macmillan's Magazine, December 1872. 



SIR THOMAS MALORY. 83 

is Still a perfect knight, a national hero, and a centre of marvel- 
lous adventure ; but he is, above everything, a defender of the 
faith according to Lord Tennyson's ideal, and according to the 
moral sense of the present generation — a hero of divine origin, 
of immaculate purity, of unwavering and unintermitting single- 
ness of purpose. Now, in these particulars, the modern poet 
departs from the Arthur of the old story. There was something 
supernatural in the origin of the old x\rthur, but he was not liter- 
ally heaven-sent : he was a child of shamefulness — not begotten 
in lawful wedlock. His father, Uther Pendragon, was transformed 
by the art of the magician, Merlin, into the likeness of Ygerne's 
husband, and Arthur was the issue of this illicit love and super- 
natural delusion of a faithful wife. Again, the Arthur of the old 
story was not stainless in the sense of loving one woman and 
cleaving to her. When he was a young squire, and before his 
origin was known either to himself or to the public, he lay with 
Morgause (or Bellicent), the wife of Lot, his half-sister; and in 
that unwittingly incestuous connection begat Mordred, who be- 
came afterwards his fatal enemy. After the battle with the eleven 
kings at Bredigan, he gratified, by the help of Merlin (who would 
not seem to have been scrupulous about playing the pander), a 
passing fancy for Lionors. And even after his marriage with 
Guinevere, not to mention his unwitting adultery with the false 
Guinevere, he was not the high, cold, self-contained Arthur of the 
Idylls. On one occasion, at least, he showed the wantonness of 
gallant curiosity, when he persisted, against Lancelot's dissuasion, 
in riding up to the fair Isoud, and staring at her until he was 
smitten off his horse by Sir Palamides for his discourtesy. Finally, 
as regards his singleness of purpose in driving out the heathen, 
therein also the modern Arthur is a refinement upon the Arthur 
of the old story, who made great war for the common selfish 
purpose of "getting all England into his hand;" and did not 
scruple to try to secure his power by committing to the mercy 
of the waves all children born on May-day, because Merlin told 
him " that he that should destroy him should be born on May- 
day." 

Arthur is not the only personage in the old story whose char- 
acter Lord Tennyson has chosen to modify. In the romance of 
Merlin, the magician falls hopelessly in love with Nimian, a 
maiden of great beauty and wisdom, teaches her all his enchant- 
ments, and is ultimately enclosed by her in a magic house without 
walls, that she may enjoy his love without interruption. In the 
' Morte d'Arthur ' this lady is Nimue, one of the damsels of the 
lake ; Merlin persecutes her with his love, letting her have no 
rest ; she " is ever passing weary of him, and fain would be 
delivered of him, for she is afeard of him, because he is a devil's 



84 Chaucer's successors. 

son ; " and at last she gets an opportunity to enclose him under a 
stone for ever. Nimue was afterwards one of the good angels of 
the Round Table, gained the love of Pelleas, brought up Lancelot, 
and more than once saved the life of Arthur, ever doing " great 
goodness unto King Arthur, and to all his knights, by her sorcery 
and enchantments." This exquisite creation of romance, to whose 
father Diana had promised that her beauty would subdue the 
wisest man of all the world, the laureate has replaced by Vivien, 
a wanton lady of the court, wholly without precedent in romance, 
who, out of vulgar ambition to outwit the great wizard, wrings his 
secret from him by wearing him out with voluble flattery and such 
arts as the female Yahoo applied to the naked Gulliver.^ The sons 
of Bellicent, again, are seriously transfigured in the Idylls. In the 
old story, Arthur's death, through the treason and by the hand of 
Mordred, his own son by unconscious incest, appears as the inex- 
orable vengeance of an iron law that accepts no plea of ignorance. 
The king is punished by the fruit of his own involuntary crime. 
Lord Tennyson wipes off this blot of incest from the life of his 
spotless hero, and attributes the treason of Mordred, whom he 
represents as the lawful son of Lot, to simple depravity of nature. 
And to deepen the colours of this natural taint, he extends it to 
Gawain, the son of Bellicent and Lot, incriminating the whole of 
them as a crafty deceitful race, with traitor hearts hid under a 
courteous exterior. 

These modifications of the old story and the old characters must 
be left to justify themselves, very much as if the modern version 
were a wholly new creation. It is best on all grounds to regard 
it as such : we should spoil the ' Morte d'Arthur ' were we to read 
it by the light of Lord Tennyson's conceptions ; and we should 
be unfair to Lord Tennyson were we to condemn him for depart- 
ing from the somewhat uncertain outlines of the ' Morte d'Arthur.' 
We must take the " Idylls of the King " on their own merits. 
If the poet had been writing a tragedy on a theme that appears 
on the surface, at least, so admirably suited for tragedy, one 
cannot see that he would have gained anything by rejecting the 
incestuous birth of Mordred and its flit-al consequences. But 
the "Idylls of the King" are idylls; it is obvious that their 
greater simplicity is in accordance with the idyllic nature of the 
poetry. We are not distracted by bewildering mixtures of good 
and evil in the " Idylls of the King " : the king is blameless ; 
Mordred is wholly vile, with no justification as an instrument 
of Nemesis, or a revenger of the inhuman attempts upon his own 

1 I am not sure that Mr Swinburne is right in speaking of Vivien as a vilifica- 
tion of the Lady of the Lake. Lord Tennyson has kept up the Lady of the Lake 
as a benignant enchantress, only he has disconnected her from the disappear- 
ance of Merhn, and ascribed that to an independent and wholly new personage. 



JOHN SKELTON. 85 

infant life ; Lancelot and Guinevere are noble natures stained by 
one great sin. As the simple clearly outlined figures pass before 
us, we are not agitated by changing admiration and abhorrence ; 
their first impression is ever deepened as they come and go by 
repeated strokes on the same spot of our moral vision. When the 
catastrophe comes, and death passes over them, we look back 
upon their lives without the conflict of emotion that appertains to 
tragedy. They affect us as visionary types, not as men and women 
of mixed passions. 



4. John Skelton (1460-1529). 

This is a fresh, audacious, boisterous, wayward pupil of Chau- 
cer's, very different from the tame decorous Lydgate. He plays 
wanton freaks with the time-honoured copy-books of the school : 
writes a few lines in sober imitation, and then dashes off into 
all sorts of madly capricious irregularities. He is, indeed, so 
independent of models that he should have a chapter to himself, 
were it not that this would exaggerate him out of all proportion to 
his poetic importance. It wants some leniency in the definition 
of poetry to allow him the title of poet at all ; he was not much 
more of a poet than Swift. 

A genius thus " wild, madding, jocund, and irregular," is natu- 
rally a puzzle to his critics, and he has been very variously esti- 
mated. He had no doubt of his own position himself: in his 
genial impudent way he wrote a poem of sixteen hundred lines 
(the " Garland of Laurel ") in which Fame and Pallas hold a 
complimentary dialogue over him ; Gower, Chaucer, and Lyd- 
gate overcome his modest scruples to enter the Temple of Fame ; 
and a bevy of fair and noble ladies embroider a rich crown for 
him with silk threads of green, red, tawny, white, black, purple, 
and blue. Other critics have been less favourable. Webbe, in 
his * Discourse of English Poetry' (1586), was tolerably gracious : 
" I with good right yield him the title of a poet ; he was doubt- 
less a pleasant conceited fellow, and of a very sharp wit, exceed- 
ing bold, and would nip to the very quick where he once set 
hold." But the courtly Puttenham, in his ' Art of English Poesy ' 
(1589), found Skelton's coarseness more offensive : he is " a sharp 
satirist, but with more railing and scoffery than became a poet- 
laureate ; such among the Greeks were called Pantomimi ; with 
us. Buffoons, altogether applying their wits to scurrilities and 
other ridiculous matters." However, he found a champion in 
D'Israeli, who pronounced him " too original for some of his 
critics ; they looked on the surface, and did not always suspect the 
depths they glided over." 



S6 Chaucer's successors. 

There is one depth that we may very easily ghde over, if we 
are not on our guard. If we are not accustomed to distinguish 
between occasional moods and predominant character, we may 
fail to notice that the most furious occasional riots of ridicule and 
laughter are compatible with prevailing seriousness and good 
sense. Reading " Phihp Sparrow," or the " Tunning of Elinour 
Rumming," we may refuse to believe in the possibility of the 
solid qualities that procured for Skelton the charge of educating 
the young prince (afterwards Henry VIII.), and the honour of 
being hailed by Erasmus as iinum lumeji ac deciis — the only light 
and ornament — of British letters. But a little knowledge of the 
versatility of human nature will prevent us from falling into Miss 
Strickland's mistake of describing Skelton as a " ribald and ill- 
living wretch," who probably " laid the foundation for his royal 
pupil's grossest crimes." This is not merely judging without 
allowance from Skelton's writings, but taking for granted as gospel 
truth all the mythical tales that have accumulated round Skelton's 
name ; it is like describing George Buchanan from the chap- 
books as the " king's fool." Skelton belongs to a type by no 
means uncommon ; a man habitually serious and laborious, but 
endowed with the ungovernable energy that under excitement dis- 
plays itself in rude bursts of extravagant mirth, and effusions of 
demonstrative affection. 

When we look through the two volumes of Skelton's works 
collected by Mr Dyce,^ we find underlying the mantling humour 
abundant evidence of a clear and capacious mind. The •'' Bowge 
of Court " — " Ship of Court," a satirical allegory — and the moral 
interlude, " Magnificence," are written with consistency and force 
of character, and abound in terse maxims of worldly wisdom : 
these productions show that the " ribald and ill-living wretch " 
was a penetrating observer, and might have been a sage counsellor. 
In Skelton's writings, however, it is not to be denied that the 
extravagantly ludicrous intrudes itself on every other quality ; 
before he can go far in a serious vein, the humour collects again, 
and explodes at the slightest touch, irresistibly forcing his person- 
ages into violent movements and extreme manifestations. For 
instance, in his " Bowge of Court," he goes on for a little with his 
dehneation of personified Disdain in tolerable soberness, though 
with occasional strong touches verging on the ludicrous ; but 
this serious proceeding has not endured long when we come to a 
livelier stanza — 

1 1843. Mr Dyce says that, " of almost all Skelton's writings which have 
descended to our times, the first editions have perished; and it is impossible to 
determine either at what period he commenced his career as a poet, or at what 
date his various pieces were originally written." Many of the works enumerated 
in the " Garland of Laurel " are no longer in known existence. 



JOHN SKELTON. 87 

" Forthwith he made on me a proud assault, 

With scornful look moved all in mood; 
He went about to take me in a fault ; 

He frowned, he stared, he stamped where he stood. 

I looked on him, I weened he had been wood. 
He set the arm proudly under the side, 
And in this wise he gan with me to chide." 

All his personages are thrown more or less into these laughable 
exaggerated attitudes : the poet's irrepressible humour transforms 
them all into caricatures. Prince Magnificence is the Herod of 
the Mysteries out-Heroded, blown up with absurd pride, declaring 
himself peerless and incomparable, threatening to drive down 
everybody like dastards with a dint of his fist, or flap them like 
fools to fall at his feet. In extreme contrast to this heavy 
tyrant is the airy skipping and strutting sprightliness of Courtly 
Abusion — 

" What now, let see, 
Who looketh on me 
W^ell round about 
How gay and how stout 
That I can wear 
Courtly my gear : 
My hair busheth 
So pleasantly, 
My robe rusheth 
So ruttingly : 
Me seem I fly, 
I am so light 
To dance delight." 

Not less extravagant is the wild hilarity of Liberty, singing as he 
dwells on sweet recollections — 

" With, ' Yea, marry, sirs,' thus should it be : 
I kissed her sweet and she kissed me; 
I danced the darling on my knee; 
I garred her gasp, I garred her glee, 
With, ' Dance on the lea, the lea ! ' 
I bassed that baby with heart so free: 
She is the boot of all my bale." 

This last passage reminds us of the demonstrative fondness of 
Swift's "Journal to Stella," and the suggestion of resemblance is 
still stronger in the lament for " Philip Sparrow," written in name 
of a young lady to commemorate her loss of a pet. The tender 
bits in '^Phihp Sparrow" and in the "Journal to Stella" are 
written in exactly the same strain of fondling affection. We 
should not have been surprised to find the following passage in 
the "Journal," as Swift's interpretation of Stella's feehngs on a 
similar occasion ; — 



88 Chaucer's successors. 

'* It was so pretty a fool : 
It would sit on a stool, 
And learned after my school 
For to keep his cut, 
With, ' Philip, keep your cut ! ' 

It had a velvet cap, 
And would sit on my lap, 
And seek after small worms, 
And sometimes white bread crumbs : 
And many times and oft 
Between my breasts soft 
It would lie and rest; 
It was proper and prest. 

Sometimes he would gasp 
When he saw a wasp; 
A fly or a gnat 
He would fly at that; 
And prettily he would pant 
When he saw an ant; 
Lord, how he would pry 
After the butterfly ! 
Lord, how he would hop 
After the grassop ! 
And when I said, Phip, Phip ! 
Then he would leap and skip, 
And take me by the lip. 
Alas, it will me slo 
That Philip is gone me fro ! 

Alas, mine heart it slayeth, 

My Philip's doleful death ! 

When I remember it, 

How prettily it would sit, 

Many times and oft. 

Upon my finger aloft ! 

I played with him tittle tattle, 

And fed him with my spattle. 

With his bill between my lips ; 

It was my pretty Phips ! 

Many a pretty kuss 

Had I of his sweet muss ; 

And now the cause is thus, 

That he is slain me fro 

To my great pain and woe." 

With all his buffooning and humour, Skelton was capable of sharp 
satire and fierce invective. He was not so wrapt up in grotesque 
fancies and ebullient self-complacency as to be satisfied with the 
whole world as well as with himself. He was a good and an 
extensive hater. More than one of his contemporaries felt his 
power to nip to the quick. He had personal quarrels with one 
Garnesche, a gentleman usher at court; Barclay, the Scotch 
author of the ' Ship of Fools ' ; Gaguin, a French Ambassador ; 



JOHN SKELTON. 89 

and Lily, the grammarian. His poems against Garnesche are pre- 
served, and are rare studies in foul language. A more illustrious 
object of his aversion and rude railing rhymes was Cardinal 
Wolsey. At one time Skelton enjoyed the patronage of the 
Cardinal, and rendered homage in his dedications ; but after- 
wards he took or received offence, and assailed his former patron 
with remarkable boldness and scurrilous rancour. The following 
is a specimen of his voluble abuse : — 

" Our barons be so bold 
Into a mouse-hole they wold 
Run away and creep, 
Like a mayny of sheep ; 
Dare not look out at dur 
For dread of the mastiff cur, 
For dread of the butcher's dog, 
Would worry them like a hog. 

For and this cur do gnarr. 
They must stand all afar. 
To hold up their hand at the bar. 
For all their noble blood, 
He plucks them by the hood. 
And shakes them by the ear, 
And brings them in such fear; 
He baiteth them like a bear, 
Like an ox or a bull : 
Their wits, he saith, are dull; 
He saith they have no brain 
Their estate to maintain; 
And maketh them to bow the knee 
Before his majesty; 
Judges of the King's laws 
He counts them fools and daws. 

In the Chancery where he sits 

But such as he admits 

None so hardy to speak ; 

He saith — "Thou buddy peak, 

Thy learning is too lewd, 

Thy tongue is not well thewed 

To seek before our grace; 

And openly in that place 

He rages and he raves 

And calls them cankered knaves. 

Thus royally he doth deal 

Under the King's broad seal ; 

And in the Chequer he them checks ; 

In the Star Chamber he nods and becks, 

And beareth him there so stout, 

That no man dare rout, 

Duke, Earl, Baron, nor Lord, 

But to his sentence must accord 

Whether he be knight or squire 

All men must follow his desire." 



90 CHAUCER S SUCCESSORS. 

Although himself in orders and not averse to preferment in the 
Church, Skelton did not refrain from exercising his satire on the 
state of rehgion. " CoHn Clout " is one of the most celebrated 
attacks on the clergy prior to the Reformation, and must have 
helped materially to increase, or at least to support, the popular 
dissatisfaction with the Church. His position may be said to be 
characteristic of English Church reformers. He attacks the offi- 
cials, but spares the institutions. He is most scornful towards 
certain presumptuous young scholars who had shown some desire 
for reform of doctrine. He tries hard to make them ashamed of 
their little rags of rhetoric, their little lumps of logic, their pieces 
and patches of philosophy. In " Colin Clout," with a certain 
assumption of irony, he disclaims the character of a reformer, be- 
cause people do not like the inquisitive, prying, meddlesome ways 
of such a character. For himself, the time seems so utterly out of 
joint, that he doubts the use of trying to set it right. He proposes 
merely to repeat what he, Colin Clout, hears as he wanders in and 
out among the people. He merely retails what they say hugger- 
mugger, or the " logic that they chop " — 

" And in their fury hop 
When the good ale sop 
Doth dance in their fore top." 

The common people, he says ironically, are doubtless liars, 
slanderers, and railing rebels ; but they have much to say about 
the pride, venality, luxury, and debauchery of the clergy, both 
great and small. The higher clergy, forgetting their humble 
origin, keep great state ; treat the lords temporal with open 
insolence ; hunt, hawk, neglect their duties, rob and spoil their 
charge, admit to holy orders worthless untaught drunkards — men 
of small intelligence and great sloth ; have their houses adorned 
with lascivious pictures. The begging friars intrigue with the 
servants, encourage them in discontent, flatter them with filed 
tongue and pleasant style, and wheedle from them the good things 
of the larder. It is really too bad of the common people to make 
such accusations — 

" What hath laymen to do 
The gray goose for to shoe? 
Like hounds of hell 
They cry and they yell 
How that ye sell 
The grace of the Holy Ghost : 
Thus they make their boast 
Throughout every coast 
How some of you do eat 
In Lenten season flesh meat, 



STEPHEN HAWES. 9 1 

Pheasants, partridge, and cranes ! 
Men call you therefore profanes. 
Ye pick no shrimps nor pranes; 
Salt-fish, stock-fish, nor herring. 
It is not for your wearing : 
Nor in holy Lenten season 
Ye will neither beans nor peasen, 
But ye will look to be let loose 
To a pig or goose ; 
Your gorge not endued 
Without a capon stewed 
Or a stewed cockle." 

The chief production of Skelton's that has laughter for its 
ultimate end, is the " Tunning of Elinour Rumming," a picture 
of a low alewife and her customers. It is too coarse to quote. It 
deals with the same materials as Burns's "Jolly Beggars"; but 
the treatment is as widely different as the character of the writers. 
Burns, with catholic sympathy, enters into the spirit of the 
" splore " held by his " gangrel bodies," his vagrant waifs. In 
the excitement of the festivity their sorrows are forgotten, their 
rags unheeded ; they are raised to the rank of gods. Skelton, on 
the other hand, writes in a strain that would please a teetotal 
lecturer. Elinour and her friends are reduced by their craving 
for drink to the level of beasts. They are painted with harsh, 
coarse, cynical feeling, as by one utterly revolted and enraged 
at their squalid, uncared-for persons, their unclean habits, and 
miserable shifts to get their fill of the old hag's filthy ale. We 
laugh at their preposterous mishaps, but it is a bestial orgie. 

5. Stephen Hawes. 

This well-intentioned versifier was contemporary with Skelton ; 
but two men could not well be more dissimilar. Hawes is said to 
have been a travelled Oxonian, and to have obtained a place in 
the household of Henry VII. by his knowledge of French and 
facility in repeating the English poets. Of this last accomplish- 
ment there are many traces in his " Pastime of Pleasure," a didactic 
poem in a thin disguise of romantic allegory ; and it is pretty 
nearly the only accomplishment or claim to interest that the poem 
exhibits. If Skelton is fresh as a relief from Lydgate, Hawes is 
doubly dull and spiritless after Skelton. When we come to Hawes, 
we regret that Professor Lowell threw away his eloquent illus- 
trations of tediousness upon Gower. He should have kept them 
for the so-called " Pastime of Pleasure." Gower cannot boast of 
such a perseverance in drivel ; and it beats either of the two living 
exemplars, whom cis-Atlantic politeness forbids us to name. 

In the prefatory address " To the Reader," we are informed that 



92 CHAUCER S SUCCESSORS. 

the title of the work is a pious fraud : that the design of the writer 
is to entice young men, by the promise of pastime and pleasure, 
into a course of valuable instruction in the seven sciences and in 
moral habits. He holds out the unsophisticated bait that " herein 
thou mayest easily find (as it were in pastime), without offence of 
nature, that thing, and in short space, which many great clerks 
without great pains and travail, and long continuance of time 
heretofore could never obtain nor get." The various precepts 
are made attractive to youth by being represented as the course 
that a young man must follow before he can hope to win a lady's 
favour. The hero of the poem, Graunde Amoure, relates how he 
met Fame : how she fired his fancy by a description of the incom- 
parable La Belle Fucelle : how she directed him to the tower of 
Doctrine, where he was instructed in succession by seven mis- 
tresses. Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, 
and Astronomy : how in the chamber of Music he met his fair 
lady, wooed and won her love, but was parted from her and 
warned that he must conquer certain giants before she became 
his : how he conquered those giants with the help of certain per- 
sonifications whom he met on the way, and married La Belle 
Pucelle. When he had lived many years with his wife. Age walked 
into his house, bringing Policy and Avarice. Fame celebrates 
him after his death. 

Warton has said that Hawes " has added new graces to Lydgate's 
manner ; " and we may admit this if we are allowed to give our 
own interpretation to the words. But what are we to make of 
Southey's saying that the " Pastime of Pleasure," composed as 
he himself states in 1506, is " the best English poem of its cen- 
tury " ? That such a judgment should have been given by any one 
that had read any of Hawes's predecessors, is a standing puzzle 
and bewilderment. As we plod conscientiously through the dreary 
pastime, we cannot hel]) wondering whether Southey, who could 
not " afford either time or eyesight for correcting the proof-sheets 
of such a volume" as his British Poets, but who afforded the float- 
ing power of his name to the most execrably inaccurate rei^rint 
ever offered to the public, had ever been foolish enough to waste 
either time or eyesight on Hawes in any form whatever. Nothing 
short of a few pages of the poem can give the reader an adequate 
idea of its lustreless retailing of borrowed beauties, its mechanical 
piecing together of lines and rhymes with unmeaning and tautol- 
ogous fag-ends and bits. Take his description of his matchless 
heroine. La Belle Pucelle, which he has laboured with especial 
care — 

" In which dwelleth by great authority 
I.a Belle Pucelle, which is so fair and bright ; 
To whom in beauty no peer 1 can see : 



STEPHEN HAWES. 93 

For like as Phcebus, above all stars in light, 
When that he is in his sphere aright, 
Doth exceed with his beames clear, 
So doth her beauty above other appear. 

She is both good, aye wise, and virtuous, 
And also descended of a noble line; 
Rich, comely, right meek, and bounteous ; 
All manner virtues in her clearly shine; 
No vice of her may right long domine : 
And I, dame Fame, in every nation 
Of her do make the same relation." 

Take another specimen, in the old spelhng, and see whether 
that flavour of antiquity makes the style more enjoyable. I give 
also the original uniform pointing as it appears in Southey's text, 
not venturing to make a new distribution of the adjuncts — 

" The roufe was painted, with golden beames 
The windowes crystal!, clearely clarified 
The golden raies, and depured streames 
Of radiant Phoebus, that was purified 
Right in the Bull, that time so domified 
Throughe windowes, was resplendishant 
About the chamber, fair and radiaunt." 

There is a grammatical connection among these scattered mem- 
bers, and to discover it will be a fair exercise in punctuation. 

The " Pastime of Pleasure " is said to have been composed in 
1506. It was first printed in 15 17, and it was reprinted in 1554 
and in 1555. It was included in Southey's selection from Early 
British Poets in 1831. Antony Wood lamented that, in his time, 
it was " thought but worthy of a ballad-monger's stall." We are 
less astonished at this than at the fact that Southey considered it 
worth reprinting in full in a selection that had no room for a 
single passage from Lydgate or Dunbar. Some of the critics of 
Southey's generation, in their laudable zeal to make Art the hand- 
maid of Morality, seem to have been betrayed into criticising upon 
the principle that everything moral is poetical, no matter how 
tame, stupid, and lifeless. 



IV. — Scottish Successors. 

The Scottish disciples of Chaucer are, on the whole, a more 
brilliant line of descendants than their English brethren. The 
seeds of mediaeval poetry found a virgin soil in Scotland ; and 
though the stems and flowers had something of the Scotch hard- 
ness, the crop was luxuriant enough. 



94 CHAUCER S SUCCESSORS. 

I. James I. (i 394-1437). 

This accomplished and unfortunate king — born in 1394, held 
as a captive in England from 1405 to 1424, and assassinated, 
after a firm and popular reign, in 1437 — was by far the most 
successful imitator of Chaucer. Though he has no title to the 
rank of original poet, which some of his admirers claim for him, his 
"King's Quhair " {Qui?-e or Book) is justly the most celebrated 
English poem of the fifteenth century. It is written in Troilus 
verse, and is commonly said, though the notion is probably 
erroneous,^ to have given that stanza its designation of rhyme- 
royal. In general structure, the poem belongs to the same family 
as Chaucer's graceful fantasies. The main incident is imitated 
from the Knight's Tale ; and many turns of expression have been 
caught from the master.- The poet supposes himself, after his 
restoration to his kingdom, to waken at midnight, when — 

" High in the heavenes figure circulere 
The ruddy starres twinkled as the fire, 
And in Aquary Cinthia the clear 
Rinsed her tresses like the golden wire." 

He falls a-thinking, and, finding that he cannot sleep, reads 
' Boece's Consolations.' But Boece is no sleep-compeller, and 
keeps his majesty awake with thoughts on the variableness of 
Fortune. He tosses about, and travels restlessly over his past 

life — 

" Among these thoughtes rolling to and fro, 
Fell me to mind of my fortune and ure,^ 
In tender youth how she was first my foe. 
And eft* my friend, and how I gat recure 
Of my distress, and all my adventure 

I gan o'er-hale, that longer sleep ne rest 
Ne might I not, so were my wittes wrest." 

Suddenly the matins bell begins to sound, and seems to say to 
him — "Tell on, man, what thee befel." He resolves at once to 
do so ; gets up, takes a pen, makes the sign of the cross, invokes 
Calliope and her sisters in the name of Mary, and forthwith 
proceeds to tell the story of his captivity and courtship. He 
relates how his father prepared to send him to France, and how 
he was captured by an English ship and imprisoned in the tower. 
There he lay bewailing his sad fortune through the long days and 
nights. But suddenly joy came out of torment. From his prison 
window he could see into a fair garden, with flower-beds, haw- 
thorn hedges, and leafy trees, filled with singing birds ; and there 
one fresh May morning came to gather flowers a vision of beauty 

1 See before, p. 20. 

2 See Mr T. H. Ward's essay in ' English Poets,' and Mr Skeat's edition, 
• Scottish Text Society,' 3 Use — hap. * Again. 



JAMES I. 95 

that sent the blood of all his body to his heart — a lady with 
" beauty enough to make a world to dote," so fair that she might 
be taken for " god Cupido's own princess," or " even very Nature 
the goddess," the painter of all the heavenly colours of the garden, 
come in person to survey her handiwork. For a moment he was 
astounded ; but soon he began to feel that he had become for ever 
thrall to the fair apparition. ^ He drank in all the particulars of 
her beauty ; noted her attire, which was loose and simple, and 
feasted his eyes on a heart-shaped ruby hanging from a gold neck- 
lace, and burning like a wanton flame on her white throat ; chided 
the nightingale for not singing to her ; and after her departure, sat 
at his window in despair till night came on, leaning his head on 
the cold stone and bemoaning his destiny. 

The conception of all this is well calculated to give scope for 
luxurious execution. It is a spacious and effective framework for 
studies of melancholy reflection, pangs of thwarted love, scenical 
richness, and womanly beauty. The execution, however, is not 
equal to the conception : it comes very far short of the softness, 
delicacy, and voluptuous richness of Chaucer. In what follows of 
the poem — for the above is comprised in two out of the six cantos 
— one is no less struck by the largeness and clearness of the plan, 
the vigorous judgment in bringing good situations naturally and 
fitly within the course of the poem. In Canto iii. he is trans- 
ported to the Court of Venus, to plead for mercy from the Queen 
of Love, whose power he has long set at nought. In Canto iv. he 
is conducted to the Palace of Minerva, and receives much wise 
counsel. In Canto v. he goes in quest of Fortune, along the 
banks of a river, and through woods filled with all manner of wild 
beasts ; finds her " howffing " on the ground, with her wheel 
before her, and obtains assurance of her favour. In the last Canto 
a turtle-dove presents him with a formal notification that his 
prayers have been heard, and that his desires will be speedily 
fulfilled. Readers familiar with Chaucer will see that the royal 
imitator has contrived to run the stream of his story past the 
very best opportunities for description, through the very heart of 
the country pictured in the " Court of Love," the " Parliament of 
Birds," and the " House of Fame." And it must be owned that, 
while the " King's Quhair " seems deficient in richness and deli- 
cacy of colouring when placed side by side with the work of the 
master, it reads remarkably well when removed from damaging 
comparison, and is infinitely the best composition produced in 
the school of Chaucer. There is real passion in it, and a real 

1 This is commonly supposed to be a true narrative of King James's first 
vision of Lady Jane Beaufort. There is not the slightest reason to believe that 
it is anything but a romantic fancy, imitated from the appearance of Emily to 
Palamon and Arcite. As a real incident, it is as probable as that a turtle-dove 
brought him the blissful news of relief from his pain (Canto vi. 5-7). 



g6 Chaucer's successors. 

sense of beauty, though the expression fails to strike through and 
rise above the embarrassing self-criticism that cramps so many 
Scotch attempts at eloquence and poetry. The proportions are 
good, but the surface is dry and hard. 

In confirmation of this, the lover's approach and address to 
Venus (Canto iii. 25-28) may be compared with similar passages 
in the " Court of Love." The third of these stanzas is modelled 
on the invocation of the Virgin in the ' Canterbury Tales ' of the 
Second Nun. 

" With quaking heart astonate of that sight 

Unnethes^ wist I what that I should sain, 

But at the laste feebly as I might 

With my handes on t)oth my knees twain, 

There 1 begouth '^ my cares to complain; 
With ane humble and lamentable cheer 
Thus salute I that goddess bright and clear. 

* High Queen of Love ! star of benevolence ! 
Piteous princess, and planet merciable ! 
Appeaser of malice and violence ! 
By virtue pure of your aspectes hable 
Unto your grace let now been acceptable 

My pure request, that can no further gone 

To seeken help, but unto you alone. 

As ye that been the succour and sweet well 

Of remedy, of careful heartes cure 

And in the huge weltering waves fell, 

Of loves rage, blissful haven and sure : 

O anchor and true of our good aventure, 

Ye have your man with his good will conquest, 
Mercy, therefore, and bring his heart to rest.' " 

The beginning of Canto v., describing his journey in quest of 
Fortune, also comes into direct comparison with Chaucer (** Par- 
liament of Birds," 180, 360, &c.). 

*' Where in a lusty plain took I my way. 
Along a river, pleasant to behold, 
Embroiden all with freshe flowres gay, 
Where through the gravel, bright as any gold, 
The crystal water ran so clear and cold, 
That in mine eare made continually 
A manner soun melled with harmony. 

That full of little fishes by the brim, 
Now here now there, with backes blue as lead, 
Leapt and played, and in a rout gan swim 
So prettily, and dressed them to spread 
Their coral finnes as the ruby red, 

That in the sunneshine their scales bright 

As gesserant aye glittered in my sight." 

1 Hardly. 2 Began. 



ROBERT HENRYSON. 9/ 

Two humorous poems — " Pebbles to the Play " and "Christ's 
Kirk on the Green " — dealing with the riotous merry-making of 
the lower orders, and written with very heavy spirit, are ascribed 
to James I. by some authorities. Since, however, their authorship 
is disputed, and we shall have abundant illustration of Scotch 
humorous poetry in Dunbar, I shall pass them over. 

2. Robert Henryson (1425-1495?). 

The schoolmaster of Dunfermline had much less power than 
King James, but his poetry was more self-determined and less 
imitative. The only ascertained date in his life is his admission 
to the newly founded University of Glasgow in 1462 : he may 
thence be conjectured to have flourished midway between King 
James and Dunbar. He seems to have been a grave, religious, 
gentle scholar, observant, full of prudent precepts, melancholy re- 
flections, and quiet humour. He wrote httle, and elaborated that 
little with Virgilian care. He generally imposed upon himself the 
double restraint of rhyme and alliteration, and fitted most of his 
ballads with a refrain : he used considerable variety of metre. 
King James's style was opposed to the English in point of dif- 
fuseness, but Henryson studied compression even more than his 
royal predecessor : he would seem to have struggled to express 
himself in few words and circumstances, and to make the few as 
pregnant as possible. His scenes are masterpieces of delicate and 
faithful word-painting. 

Henryson's most celebrated composition is a continuation of 
Troilus, called the " Testament of Cresside," written with a view 
to providing a suitable retribution for the fair lady's breach of 
faith : in an important council of the Gods of the Seven Planets, 
she is doomed to leprosy, and bequeaths a lamentation and a 
warning to all false lovers. He is also the author of the first 
pastoral poem in the language — "Robin and Malkin " ; and of 
one of the earliest Scotch ballads — "The Bluidy Serk," a relig- 
ious allegory. He wrote also a poem on Orpheus and Eurydice, 
and versified certain ' Fables of ALsop.^ 

The opening stanza of his " Praise of Age " is a fair specimen 
of his most spirited manner, though containing perhaps less allit- 
eration than usual : — 

" Intill a garthji under a red rosere,^ 

An old man and decrepid hard I sing; 
Gay was the note, sweet was the voice and clear. 
It was great joy to hear of such a thing : 
And to my doom, he said, in his diling, 

1 Into a garden. 2 Rose-bush, 



98 Chaucer's successors. 

For to be young I would not, for my wiss 

Of all this world to make me lord and king: 
The more of age the nearer heavenes bliss." 

The following seven-line staves display considerable power : — 

" Syne ^ Winter wan, with austere ^'Eolus, 

God of the wind, with blastes boreal 

The green garment of Summer glorious 

Has all to rent and riven in pieces small : 

Then flowres fair, faded with frost, mon fall, 
And birdes blithe changes their notes sweet 
Intil mourning, near slain with snow and sleet.- 

Syne comes Ver, when Winter is away, 

The secretar of Summer with his seal; 

When columbine up keekes ^ through the clay, 

Whilk fleyed'* was l^efore with frostes fell; 

The mavis and the merle begins to mell ; ^ 
The lark on loft, with other birdes small 
Then drawes forth from dern,*^ o'er down and dale." 

3. William Dunbar (1460-15?). 

The pride of early Scottish poetry is William Dunbar. He is 
usually spoken of as being, next to Burns, the greatest poet that 
Scotland has produced. Looking upon him simply as a Scottish 
poet, we may regard King James and Henryson as his precursors, 
and as isolated fine days before the confirmed summer. But this 
altogether exaggerates his importance in a more cosmopolitan 
view. Employing the machinery of allegorical dream, and sweet 
spring proemiums, he must be considered as being through Chaucer 
one of the numerous poetical progeny of the Roman de la Rose : 
he is the best Scottish representative of the movement initiated 
and transmitted by that poem. Other influences went to the 
making of his poetry, but his main impulse came from Chaucer. 
He was formed in the school of Chaucer, as Chaucer was in the 
school of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. 

The first record of Dunbar's name is on the register of the 
University of St Andrews, where he appears in 1477 as a " Deter- 
minant," or Bachelor of Arts, and again in 1479 ^s Master of Arts. 
The next record is in the register of the Privy Seal : in the year 
1500 he obtained a yearly pension of ten pounds for life, or until 
he should be promoted to an ecclesiastical benefice. But the 
gaping spaces between these meagre and insignificant records are 
filled up from hints in the works of the poet and his poetical 

1 Then — next. 

2 The readings " austern," " changit," and " in still murning," are obviously erro- 
neous, 

3 Peeps. 4 Frightened, ^ Mingle. 6 Secret — hiding-place. 



WILLIAM DUNBAR. 99 

antagonis'i, Walter Kennedy. In early life he joined the Francis- 
can friars, and begged in the habit of that order. Addressing the 
pretended St Francis, he says : — 

" Gif ever my fortune was to be a friar, 
The date thereof is past full many a year; 

For in to every lusty town and place 

Of all England, from Berwick to Calais, 
I have in to thy habit made good cheer. 

In friares weed full fairly have I fleeched ; ^ 
In it have I in pulpit gone and preached 

In Derntoun kirk and eek in Canterbury ; 

In it I passed at Dover o'er the ferry 
Through Ficardy, and there the people teached." 

By James IV., who came to the throne in 1488, he would seem to 
have been employed as a clerk to foreign embassies, visiting Paris 
more than once in that capacity. Later in life he proved the value 
of his early practice as a beggar by the ingenuity and variety of his 
supplications to the king. He received occasional gratuities, and 
an increase of his pension ; but he never attained the fat Church 
benefice that he coveted and prayed for so earnestly. 

This jolly quick-witted friar and courtier is sometimes called the 
Scottish Chaucer. The two have, indeed, a good many points of 
resemblance. Both were men of the world and favourites at 
Court ; companionable men, witty and good-humoured : both 
showed sufficient address and business dexterity to be employed 
on embassies of state. But if we wish to give the title of " Scot- 
tish Chaucer " its full significance, we must place considerable 
emphasis on the adjective. Dunbar and Chaucer belong to the 
same class of easy self-contained men, whose balance is seldom 
deranged by restless straining and soaring ; but within that happy 
pleasure-loving circle they occupy distinct habitations : and one 
way of bringing out their difference of spirit is to lay stress upon 
their nationality. Dunbar is unmistakably Scotch. He is altogether 
of stronger and harder — perhaps of harsher — nerve than Chaucer ; 
more forcible and less diffuse of speech ; his laugh rs rougher ; he 
is boldly sarcastic and derisive to persons ; his ludicrous concep- 
tions rise to more daring heights of extravagance ; and, finally, he 
has a more decided turn for preaching — for offering good advice. 
Not that he is always strong-headed, extravagantly humorous, or 
gravely moral ; there are green places in his heart, and his fancies 
are sometimes sweet and graceful ; but the strength of head, the 
extravagance of humour, and the gravity of good counsel are, upon 
the whole, predominant in his composition. 

It is significant of Dimbar's intellectual activity that his versifi- 

1 Begged. 



100 CHAUCER S SUCCESSORS. 

cation is more varied than we find in any of his English predeces- 
sors. He studies variety of stanza by interweaving Hnes of differ- 
ent length, with rhymes and refrains at different intervals. Besides 
the familiar Troilus verse of seven lines, he uses stanzas of four 
lines, of five hnes, of six lines, of eight lines, of nine lines, and of 
twelve lines. In some of his stanzas the lines have five accents, in 
some four. In his " Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins," he uses the 
arrangement adopted in the opening of Burns's " Jolly Beggars " 
— couplets of four-accent lines separated by single lines of three 
accents : his stanza, however, is of twelve lines. 

His most finished poem is an allegory called the " Golden 
Targe," printed in 1508, and evidently intended to show the world 
at large what he could do. The " Golden Targe " is the armour 
of Reason against importunate Desire ; but the weapon itself is 
but a small figure in the poem. He opens with a description of a 
mirthful morning in May ; in which he shows that the habit of St 
Francis did not prevent him from enjoying the favourite season of 
the lover. He has fairly succeeded in his ambition to strike out 
new fancies. The picture is most carefully studied, and the colours 
are really gorgeous. 

" Full angelic the birdes sang their hours,^ 
Within their curtains green, into their bowers, 

Apparelled white and red, with bloomes sweet : 
Enamelled was the field with all colours; 
The pearly droppes shook in silver showers, 

While all in balm did branch and leaves fleet : ^ 

To part fro Phoebus did Aurora greet ; ^ 
Her crystal tears I saw hang on the flowers 

Whilk he for love all drank up with his heat. 

For mirth of May, with skippes and with hops, 
The birdes sang upon the tender crops, 

With curious notes as Venus chapel clerks ; 
The roses young, new spreading of their knops,^ 
Were powdered bright with heavenly beryl drops, 

Through beames red, burning as ruby sparks ; 

The skyes rang for shouting of the larks; 
The purple heaven o'erscailed ^ in silver sops ; 

Oergilt the trees, branches, leaves, and barks." 

After five stanzas of such elaborate delineation, he proceeds to say 
that he fell asleep, and begins to relate his dream : — 

1 Orisons. 2 Float. 3 Weep. 4 Buds. 

5 Overflowed. Cf. Douglas's Virgil, Prol. Book xiii. 1. 26, 

" The recent dew begynnis doun to skale.'" 

From the same passage I have conjectured that " sops" and not " slops " is the 
true reading here. See 1. 41 — 

** Out ouer the swyre " [hill-top] " swymmys the spppis of myst." 



WILLIAM DUNBAR. lOI 

" What through the merry fowles hat mony, 
And through the river's sound that ran nie by, 

On Flora's mantle 1 sleeped as 1 lay; 
"Where soon into my dreames fantasy 
I saw approach, against the orient sky, 

A sail, as white as blossom upon spray, 

With merse ^ of gold, bright as the star of day, 
Whilk tended to the land full lustily, 

As falcon swift desirous of her prey. 

And hard on hoard unto the bloomed meads, 
Among the greene rispes^ and the reeds. 

Arrived she; wherefro anon there lands 
An hundred ladies, lusty into weeds, 
As fresh as flowres that in May upspreads, 

In kirtles green, withouten carol or bands : 

Their brighte hairs hang glittering on the strands, 
In tresses clear, whipped with golden threads 

With pappes white, and middles small as wands." 

He then portrays some of the personages in this ravishing vision 
of beauties : among others — 

"There saw I May, of mirthful monthes queen. 
Betwixt April, and June, her sister sheen. 

Within the garrlen walking up and down, 
Whom of the fowles gladdeth all bedeen : ^ 
She was full tender in her yeares green. 

There saw I Nature present her a gown 

Rich to l)ehold, and noble of renown. 
Of every hue under the heaven that l)een 

Depaint, and broad by good proportion." 

His own situation is very hLxuriously painted : — 

"Full lustily these ladies all in fere^ 
Entered within this park of most pleasere. 

Where that I lay o'erhielt ^ with leaves rank; 
The merry fowles blissfullest of cheer. 
Salute Nature, methought, on their manner, 

And every bloom on branch, and eke on bank, 

Opened and spread their balmy leaves dank. 
Full low^ inclining to their Queen so clear, 

Whom of their noble nourishing they thank." 

Thereafter follow more of these studies of luxurious spectacle 
and situation, which must be owned to be no mean emulation of 
Chaucer ; and at last, just in the middle of the poem, he introduces 
what the title indicates as its main purpose : narrating how he 
was espied by the Queen of Love ; how she sent her fair minions 
in pursuit of him — Beauty, Fair Having, Fine Portraiture, Pleas- 

1 Mast. 2 Coarse grass. ^ Immediately. 

■* Company. 5 Q'ershielded. 



I02 CHAUCER S SUCCESSORS. 

ance, and Lusty Cheer ; how Reason defended him with her golden 
targe ; how his assailants were reinforced ; how Reason was for a 
time overborne and the poet taken prisoner ; how y^iohis dispersed 
the brilliant gathering, and sent them all to sea again ; and how 
he awoke and found himself in his pleasant valley, amidst soft air 
and tender sunshine, with the birds singing merrily around him. 
He ends off with a panegyric of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, 
and a modest address to his own "httle Quhair," his humble 
book. With all its transparent artificiality, the ingenious author 
had no small reason to be proud of it. He was an imitator of 
forms that had lost the freshness of youth, and he belonged to a 
nation never conspicuous for softness and delicacy ; yet he could 
send forth his book with a feeling that he had made a very 
creditable contribution to the mediaeval play of fancy and study 
of form and colour. 

The " Golden Targe " was obviously, as we have said, one of 
his most ambitious and laboured compositions. Another allegory, 
which was reprinted in ' Brydges's Restituta ' with a very high 
encomium, is called the "Thistle and the Rose." This was written 
in 1503, to celebrate the marriage of King James IV. with the 
Princess Margaret of England ; and a very ingenious and flattering 
epithalamium it is. After an elaborate description of the usual 
May morning, the poet makes Dame Nature summon before her 
the birds and the beasts, the flowers and the herbs. In delicate 
flattery of his patron, the red lion rampant is described as a most 
terrible beast ; and receives Nature's injunctions to extend his 
protection to the inferior kinds — 

" Exerce justice with mercy and conscience, 

And let no small beast suffer scathe ne scorns, 

Of greate beasts that been of more puissance; 
Do law alike to apes and unicorns, 
And let no bowgle^ with his boisterous horns 

The meek plough-ox oppress, for all his pride, 

But in the yoke go peaceable him beside." 

When Queen Nature comes to the flowers, she looks with pro- 
found respect upon " the awful thistle," and his environing " bush 
of spears," and bids him maintain order among the herbs and 
flowers like a discreet king as he is. In particular is the Thistle 
told to honour the fresh Rose ; and under the symbol of that 
flower, the poet celebrates in most flattering stanzas the " blissful 
angehc beauty" of the Princess Margaret. 

In the moral apologue of the Merle (or Blackbird) and the 
Nightingale, we have an example of the same species of compo- 
sition as Chaucer's Cuckoo and Nightingale. The Nightingale, 
however, is no longer the representative of chivalrous love as 

1 Buffalo. 



WILLIAM DUNBAR. IO3 

Opposed to the vulgar love of the Cuckoo. She represents the 
love of God in antagonism to the love of earthly creatures, 
symbolised by the Blackbird. The following are the opening 
stanzas : — 

" In May, as that Aurora did upspring 

With crystal eyen chasing the cloudes sable, 
I heard a Merle with merry notes sing 

A song of love with voice right comfortable, 
Against the orient beames amiable, 
Upon a blissful branch of laurel green; 

This was her sentence sweet and delectable, 
A lusty life in Love's service been. 
Under this branch ran down a river bright, 

Of balmy liquor, crystalline of hue, 
Against the heavenly azure skyes light; 
Where did upon the tother side pursue 
A Nightingale with sugared notes new, 
Whose angel feathers as the peacock shone : 

This was her song and of a sentence true, • 

All love is lost but upon God alone." 

It would appear that the Scotchman had never seen a nightingale 
in the course of his wanderings. His opposition of religious love 
to love in general, and his alienation of the nightingale from 
chivalrous love, shows the spirit of the friar predominating over 
the spirit of knighthood. Dunbar has none of the chivalrous feel- 
ing of Barbour or of King James. 

In the above extracts we have specimens of the sweet moods of 
Dunbar's rugged good-humoured Scotch nature. He shows little 
inclination for the loftier flights of poetry : he had not the soaring 
genius of Burns. Partly, this is owing to his natural easy tem- 
perament ; partly, no doubt, to his circumstances. There was 
little encouragement to soar in writing for the Court of James 
IV., among jealous rivals ready to pounce with keen sarcasm and 
hearty madcap derision upon any attempt at fine composition. 
All Dunbar's attempts in the way of serious sublime writing are 
upon religious themes. He has a hymn on the Nativity, another 
on the Resurrection, and a curiously rhymed " Ballet of our Lady." 
His hymn on the Nativity is commonplace and uninspired in 
comparison with Milton's. The following is one of the best 
stanzas ; — 

" Celestial fowles in the air 

Sing with your notes upon height ! 
In firthes and in forests fair 

Be mirthful now at all your might 
For passed is your doleful night ; 

Aurora has the cloudes pierct 
The sun is risen with gladsome light, 
Et nobis Piier natus est^ ^ 



1 And to us a son is born. 



I04 CHAUCER S SUCCESSORS. 

Undoubtedly the most striking quality in Dunbar's poems and 
ballads is his wild Scotch humour — the humour of robust nerves, 
delighting in extravagantly ludicrous conceptions of exalted things, 
and dealing hard knocks to persons without malice, and with the 
redeeming consciousness of being prepared to receive the same in 
return. It is only under the afflatus of this spirit that his imag- 
ination is rapt up and hurried on beyond its usual sober pace. 
His other productions are comparatively cold-blooded and me- 
chanical — mere exercises of skill. 

The bedlamite philosophy of his wilder moods is expressed in 
the following stanza, which concludes a poem designed to express 
the folly of having money without enjoyment — 

" Now all this time let us be merry, 
And set not by this world a cherry : 
Now while there is good wine to sell, 
• He that does on dry bread worry 

I give him to the Devil of Hell," 

The last expression is an instance of his habit of making humor- 
ously free with dread ideas and personages. He does so very 
frequently. He is especially familiar with the enemy of mankind 
and his myrmidons, and credits them with many a ludicrous 
prank. His " Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins," set agoing in 
hell by " Auld Mahoun," ^ is a phantasmagoric extravagance as 
wild and grim as could well be conceived : mirth could not well 
be more demoniacally riotous. It is totally different in purpose 
from Langland's "Vision of the Seven Deadly Sins;" there is 
not the faintest suspicion of a moral in it. Even the fast and 
furious " splore " of the "Jolly Beggars " is less fantastic. Pride, 
Ire, Envy, Covetousness, Idleness, Lechery, Gluttony, each with 
a train of representative followers, dance in characteristic fashion 
on the floor of their house of torment ; while fiends stand by en- 
joying the sport, and encouraging the dance with various hot ap- 
plications. The Covetous vomit hot gold at each other, and the 
fiends stand ready as they discharge one shot, to fill them " new 
up to the throat " with another. The followers of Idleness 
(" Svveirness ") require special stimulus to dance. Behal lashes 
them with a bridle-rein, and that faihng, the fiends lose patience, 
and try a stronger measure — 

" In dance they were so slow of feet, 
They gave them in the fire a heat, 

And made them quicker of cunnyie." 

The concluding stanza of the poem is a ludicrous derision of the 

1 Mahomet, a synonym for the arch-enemy. 



WILLIAM DUNBAR. 



105 



Highlandmen, to whom the Lowlanders always had a strong aver- 
sion. Mahoun sends for one of them, and has a coronach sung 
over him, whereupon the Erse men assemble and so deafen Satan 
with their outlandish clatter, that in a fury he sinks them to 
" the deepest pit of hell," and smothers them with smoke. It 
needs a strong nerve to laugh over such horrors ; but to one with 
the requisite vigour there is considerable humorous body and 
power in the stanza — 

"Then cried Mahound for a Highland pagean : 
Syne ran a fiend to fetch Macfadzean 

P'ar northward in a nook; 
By he the coronach had done shout, 
Erse men so gathered him about, 

In hell great room they took : 
These termagants, with tag and tatter, 
Full loud in Erse begowth to clatter, 

And roup ^ like raven and rook. 
The Devil so deaved^ was with their yell, 
That in the deepest pit of hell 

He smothered them with smoke." 



Dunbar is no less free in his ridicule of persons. He and 
another poet, Walter Kennedy, in the enjoyment of their gift of 
rhyme and metre, amused themselves and the Court generally 
with a pitched battle of " flyting " or vituperation. They are 
said to have been very good friends, and to have abused each 
other purely in sport, as was done by the Italian poets Luigi 
Pulci and Matteo Franco ; but friendship put no restraint upon 
their tongues ; they could hardly have been more abusive, if they 
had been in virulent earnest. They threw into the struggle their 
whole wealth of gross epithets, and neither of them was poor in 
the commodity. It is hardly worth while to quote any of this 
curious amusement. Dunbar foimd better subjects for his hu- 
morous derision in Andro Kennedy and the Abbot of Tungland. 
Mr Andro seems to have been a graceless and inveterate wine- 
bibber, and Dunbar writes a testament for him in lines of four 
accents, alternated with the formularies of a will and shreds of 
the breviary in Latin. The old sinner is made to leave his soul 
to his lord's wine-cellar, and his body to a brewer's dunghill. He 
will have no decorous funeral, but a rout of his own boon com- 
panions, drinking and weeping, as he had been wont to do, and 
preceded by two rustics with a barrel slung on a pole. No an- 
them is to be chaiHed over his grave, no bell to be rung, but he 
must be buried to a '' spring " on the bagpipes : and instead of a 

1 Croak. 2 Deafened. 



io6 Chaucer's successors. 

cross by his side, he must have four flagons of sack to frighten 
away the fiends.^ 

On the poor Abbot of Tungland, Dunbar is still more severe. 
The Abbot was one Damian, a naturalised French physician, a bold, 
boastful, ingenious fellow, who undertook to transmute metals into 
gold, and to fly in the air, and who succeeded in keeping the king's 
favour and getting Church preferment before Dunbar in spite of all 
his failures. The poet's device is to make him figure in wonder- 
fully ludicrous dreams. In one vision he appears hand in hand 
with a person in the habit of St Francis, who turns out to be the 
Devil, and vanishes "with stink and fiery smoke." In another, 
in ridicule of his attempt to fly, he is represented as soaring into 
the air " as ane horrible griffoun," meeting with a she-dragon in 
the clouds, and begetting the Antichrist. But he is assailed most 
openly and licentiously of all in the " Feigned Friar of Tungland " : 
he there mounts into the air, much to the astonishment and specu- 
lation of the regular winged denizens, and as a strange new bird 
becomes a mark for most ludicrous and coarse indignities. 

When we read Dunbar's " Twa Married Women and the Widow," 
and his burlesque " Jousts between the Tailor and the Shoemaker," 
we become less and less surprised that the poet never rose to the 
dignity of the mitre. Humour nowhere runs riot in madder intoxi- 
cation than in his pages. His appetite for mirth is unbounded — 
Brobdingnagian. He turns the world topsy-turvy : seizes on the 
most venerable and dreadful things, and dances them about on the 
top of their head. He subjects his rivals to imaginary indignities 
with all the freedom and zest of Aristophanes : he burlesques the 
services of the Church ; and as a crowning variation of the sober 
march of ordinary life, visits hell, that he may revel with Satan and 
his imps in their glee over the tortures of the damned. 

4. Gawain Douglas 2 (1475- 15 22). 

The Court of James IV. was, in many respects, a Scottish repeti- 
tion of the Court of Edward III. James lived in more splendid 

1 " I will no Priestes for me sing 

Dies ilia, dies i?-cB : 
Nor yet no belles for me ring 

Sicut seviper solet fieri : 
But a bagpipe to play a spring, 

£l Kiiuvj ale wisp ante me : 
Instead of banners for to bring 

Quatuor lagenas cerviscB : 
Within the grave to set such thing 

/u 7nodu)ii criicis Juxta me, 
To fley the fiends, then buirdly sing 

De terra palmasti me'' 

2 The works of Douglas have recently been edited, and new light thrown upon 
his life by Mr John Small. See also Dr Ross's ' Early Scottish Literature.' 



GAWAIN DOUGLAS. IO7 

State than any of his predecessors : with more of chivalrous 
pageantry and sport, and with a definite ambition to imbue his 
Court with the highest ideals of chivalry. James I. would have 
done the same, but the materials were too stubborn for him : three 
generations of civilising influences had made them more tractable, 
and his great-grandson had more success. There were many poets 
besides Dunbar at James IV. 's Court, but none of them men of 
any mark, except Gawain Douglas, third son of the great Earl of 
Angus, Archibald " Bell-the-Cat." This third son was educated 
for the Church, and family influence soon procured for him more 
than one of the benefices for one of which Dunbar pleaded with 
such humorous importunity. The learned leisure of the young 
" pluralist " was spent in writing poetry. He produced an elabo- 
rate scholarly allegory, "The Palace of Honour," in 1501, and 
another, much less stiff, much more full of hfe, some time later, 
" King Hart." But his most memorable work was a translation 
of Virgil's ^neid into heroic couplets, begun in January 15 12, 
and finished two months before the battle of Flodden. In the 
troubles that followed this calamity, Douglas lost both his livings 
and his character. The house of Douglas seemed at first likely to 
gain the highest honours, nearest to which it had long stood. The 
Earl of Angus married the widowed Queen Margaret eleven months 
after her husband's death. But the prosperity was short-lived. 
Gawain's share in it, the bishopric of Dunkeld, was not entered 
upon without a struggle, and was held but for a short time. He 
died in England in 1522, a dishonoured exile, a political intriguer 
burdened with the unpardonable sin of failure. The most chari- 
table construction of his conduct is that he was dragged by family 
connections into a stormy strife for which he was utterly unfitted^ 
by his scholarly habits. 

Each of the Books of the ^neid, as well as the Thirteenth 
Book added by Maffeus, is furnished by the translator with a 
prologue : and it is generally agreed that these prologues are the 
most favourable specimens of his ability. Most of them are dis- 
quisitions of a religious and moral nature, as became his reverend 
character ; but those prefixed to the Seventh, the Twelfth, and the 
Thirteenth Books, describe the season of the year in which they 
were begun — a winter day, a May morning, and a June sunset. 
These scenical studies are remarkable for magnificent opulence of 
detail and strength of colour. In the prologue to the Twelfth 
Book in particular, he seems to have braced himself for a final 
effort, and resolved to gather together every personification of the 
phenomena of morning, every appearance of sky, cloud, earth, and 
water, every attitude of every herb, flower, bird, beast, and insect. 
Nothing is left in a state of suggestion for the reader to fill up : 
the particulars of the richly coloured landscape are tumbled out 



io8 Chaucer's successors. 

before us with unreserved profusion. It is difficult to convey an 
idea of the tedious diffuseness of this description without quoting 
the whole : but the following few of the two hundred and seventy 
lines are as much as we have room for : — 

" And blissful blossoms in the bloomed yard ^ 
Submits their heads in the young son's safeguard : 
Ive leavees rank o'erspread the barmkin '-^ wall; 
The bloomed hawthorn clad his pikes all ; 
Forth of fresh burgeons ^ the wine grapes ying 
Along the trellis did on twistes hing; 
The locked buttons on the gemmed trees, 
O'erspreading leaves of nature's tapestries; 
Soft grassy verdure after balmy showers 
On curling stalkes smiling to their flowers; 
Beholding them so many diverse hue, 
Some pers,"^ some pale, some burnet,^ and some blue, 
Some grey, some gules, some purple, some sanguare, 
Blanched, or brown, sauch*^ yellow many are. 
Some heavenly coloured in celestial gre,'^ 
Some watery-hued as the haw** vvally^ sea, 
And some depart in freckles red and white, 
Some bright as gold with aureate leaves lite. 
The daisy did unbroad her crownal small, 
And every flower unlapped ^^ in the dale 
In battled grass burgeons, the banewort wild, 
The clover, catchook, and the camomile ; 
The flour de lys " — 

But we need not proceed with the catalogue, nor transcribe the 
ten or twelve lines that labour to express the fragrance of the 
scene. The reader must imagine the effect of two hundred and 
seventy lines on the same scale of minute description. The voluble 
poet had no notion of artistic restraint : he poured out his stores 
of synonym and circumstance with immoderate prodigality. When 
we open his Virgil, the first dozen lines of the Preface astound 
us with a torrent of eulogistic epithets addressed to the great 
master : and this first impression of overpowering volubility is 
often repeated in the course of perusal. He apologises for not 
being able to render the sententious Virgil word for word — 

" Some time the text mun have an exposition, 
Some time the colour will cause a little addition. 
And some tim:; of one word I mun make three " — 

And remarkable though the undertaking was, and meritorious the 
execution, one cannot help smiling at the translator's notions of 
unfolding the effect of his compressed original. He felt uneasy 

1 Garden. 2 Rampart, 3 Sprigs. 

^ A grey colour. ^ Dark brown. 6 Willow. 

5" Degree. 8 Adjective of colour. 9 Wavy. 
10 Unfolded. 



SIR DAVID LINDSAY. lOQ 

at the thought of leaving a condensed expression to make itself 
understood. 

These diffuse descriptions give a good opportunity for compar- 
ing the diction of the poet with contemporary English. It is 
peculiarly instructive to compare his description of Winter with 
the opening of Sackville's " Induction " in the ' Mirror for Magis- 
trates.' ^ Three points of difference are disclosed : he is fond of 
taking, direct from French, words never received into English ; he 
makes considerable coinages from Latin ; and his names for familiar 
things are in many cases peculiar to Scotch and northern English. 
These differences are more marked in Douglas than in Dunbar, 
not so much, I believe, because Douglas was an extensive inno- 
vator as because he was so immoderately copious. They would 
probably have used the same names for the same things or ideas ; 
but Douglas ranged over a much greater variety of particulars, 
and thus exposed his vocabulary to view at a much greater number 
of points. There was, however, undoubtedly a tendency among 
Scotch writers of that and the following generation to introduce 
new vocables from French and Latin. 

5. Sir David Lindsay (1490-1557). 

Though Lindsay's poetry takes us down to the middle of the 
sixteenth century, his most fitting place is among the poets of the 
present chapter. He was formed almost exclusively by their 
influences. While his English contemporaries, Wyat and Surrey, 
received their main impulse from Italy, his acknowledged masters 
were Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Henryson, Dunbar, and Douglas. 
We should, however, be misleading were we to call him an imita- 
tor of Chaucer. He used poetical forms chiefly for political and 
social purposes ; and this being the chief motive of his produc- 
tions, he did not go far afield for models, but accommodated to his 
own spirit such shapes as were fashionable around him in the 
Scottish Court. He had not enough disinterested enthusiasm for 
poetry to read the Italians, or the revived Greek and Roman 
classics. There is no allusion to Dante or Petrarch in his works, 
and only a second-hand allusion to Boccaccio ; while of Greek and 
Latin classics, he selects for special mention " the ornate Ennius," 
and Hesiod — "of Greece the perfect poet sovereign." I should 
doubt whether he was very familiar even with Chaucer : Lydgate 
and his own Scotch predecessors would seem to have been his 
principal reading. But it is difficult to trace obligations in works 

1 Both these descriptions of winter are intended to harmonise with visits to 
the infernal regions : Douglas has been there, and Sackville is going. They pr«- 
ceed upon Henryson's maxim — 

" Ane doleful season to ane careful dyte, 
Should correspond and be equivalent." 



no CHAUCER S SUCCESSORS. 

that sacrifice poetical graces to practical aims. Lindsay did not 
cultivate poetry for its own reward. His poems were very famous 
among his countrymen ; but they were admired not so much for 
their poetical charms as for their powerful help to the good cause 
of the Reformation. 

Sir David Lindsay of the Mount (his family seat in Fifeshire) 
was a great power in the Court of James V. He had been 
appointed gentleman-usher to that prince in 15 12, after a course 
of study at St Andrew^s and a visit to Italy, and he never lost the 
favour that he established with his youthful charge. He was 
knighted and made Lion King of Arms in 1530, was employed 
as an ambassador, and represented the burgh of Cupar in four 
successive Parliaments from 1543 to 1546. But, above all, he 
was allowed the utmost freedom of pen ; and was tolerated in 
trenchant abuse and biting satire of the Church, as well as in 
very frank advice to the King himself. Most of his poems, — the 
''Dream" (1528) ; the " Testament of the Papingo " (1530) ; "A 
Satire of the Three Estates" (1535); the "Complaint of the 
King's Auld Hound Bagsche " (1536); "Kitty's Confession" 
(1549), — make a free distribution of blows, cuts, and stings among 
ecclesiastics and courtiers. 

The parts of royal favourite and Church reformer have not much 
natural affinity : it must be rare to find the two combined in one 
person. Lindsay had a good many humanities in him that one 
does not expect to find in the active antagonist of an established 
faith. He was an eminently genial man. When we read how 
he nursed and amused his young master, we do not wonder that 
he was beloved and favoured in return. In the epistle to his 
" Dream," he reminds the King as follows : — 

" When thou was young I bore ye in mine arm 
Full tenderly, till thou begouth to gang; ^ • 

And in thy bed oft happit - thee full warm, 
With lute in hand, syne sweetly to thee sang: 
Sometime, in dancing, feiraly -^ I flang; 
And, sometime, playand farces on the floor; 
And, sometime, on mine office takand cure: 

And, sometime, like a fiend transfigurate; 
And, sometime, like the grisly ghost of Guy; * 
In divers forms, oft times, disfigurate; 
And, sometime, disaguised full pleasantly." 

Most undignified relaxation for a Church reformer. The remi- 
niscences of the " Complaint " bring up other particulars of this 
romping and affectionate relationship ; disclosing the young prince 
astride the gentleman-usher's neck, or borne on his back like a 
chapman's pack, or urging with imperfect articulation — " pa, da 

1 Began to walk. - Covered. 3 Wonderfully. 4 Guy of Warwick. 



SIR DAVID LINDSAY. Ill 

lyn," Play, David Lindsay, upon the lute. There were also many 
tales told of Hector, Arthur, Alexander, Caesar, Jason, Troilus, 
sieges of Tyre, Thebes, and Troy, prophecies of Merlin, Bede, and 
Thomas the Rhymer. Lindsay was evidently no narrow Puritan 
in his notions of training young royalty. He has left also among 
his works one unmistakable evidence of the breadth of his sym- 
pathies — his "History of a noble and valiant squire, William 
Meldrum," written, not in his green youth, when feats of arms 
and amorous adventures are most likely to captivate, but in 1550, 
when he had reached the mature age of sixty. It certainly is 
remarkable that the historian of Squire Meldrum should have been 
with Knox at St Andrews in 1547, acting as one of the Reformer's 
most urgent supporters ; and should have written the grave 
morality of the " Monarchy " in 1553. The great body of his 
verses, however, bore on practical life. While the kindly exuber- 
ance of spirits that made him so delightful a playmate for the 
infant prince gave vivacity and verve to all his compositions, and 
spread their popularity far and wide, the substance of them was 
moral and political ; amusement was not their end and aim, but 
a means to secure goodwill for the underlying doctrines. The 
siege of the Papingo's (parrot's) deathbed by her kind friends the 
Magpie, the Raven, and Kite, was amusing enough ; but the 
fact that the Magpie represented a " canon regular," the Raven 
a black monk, and the Kite a holy friar, excited a much keener 
interest than if the fable had symbolized nothing but the greed 
of legacy-hunters in general. The "Satire of the Three Estates," 
though inclined to be tedious from its inordinate length, was very 
entertaining as a morality-play ; but it must have owed its main at- 
tractions to its bearings on what was in immediate agitation through- 
out the kingdom. And, to take his attempt at a " tragedy" — in 
Lydgate's sense and not in Marlowe's — the fall of Cardinal Beaton 
was impressive merely as an illustration of the caprice of Fortune ; 
but Lindsay would not have undertaken to make a poem on the 
subject, had he not been desirous to impress his countrymen with 
the crimes that led to the Cardinal's overthrow. 

One might select from the ornamental fringes to Lindsay's 
satirical verse occasional passages of genuine poetical enthusiasm, 
in which he has suspended and forgotten his didactic, and done his 
best to express the situation. His " Dream " is the earliest and 
most poetical of his works ; in it his satirical aims were consid- 
erably abashed and qualified by emulation of his models, and it 
contains passages that will bear comparison with anything in his 
Scotch predecessors. Take, for instance, part of his description of 
Winter in the prologue. It is fit and proper that the strength of 
both Douglas and Lindsay, these last survivors of the Chaucerian 
school, should lie in the description of winter. Douglas wrote 



112 CHAUCER S SUCCESSORS. 

nothing superior to his prologue to the Seventh Book of his transla- 
tion, and Lindsay wrote nothing superior to the following. He has 
walked out well wrapt up in cloak and hood, with " double shoen " 
on his feet, and " mittens " on his hands : — 

" I met Dame Flora, in dule ^ weed dlsaguised, 
Whilk into May was dulce and delectable ; 
With stalwart storms her sweetness was surprised ; 
Her heavenly hues were turned into sable, 
Whilk umwhile were to lovers amiable. 
Fled from the frost the tender flowers I saw, 
Under Dame Nature's mantle lurking law.'-^ 

The small fowles in flockes saw I flee. 

To Nature, making (great) lamentation : 

They Hghted down beside me, on a tree; 

Of their complaint I had compassion; 

And with a piteous exclamation, 

They said — Blessed be Summer with his flowers. 

And waryed^ be thou. Winter, with thy showers. 

Alas, Aurora ! the silly lark gan cry, 
Where hast thou left thy balmy liquor sweet. 
That us rejoiced, we mounting in the sky? 
Thy silver drops are turned into sleet. 
O fair Phoebus, where is thy wholesome heat? 
Why tholes'* thou thy heavenly pleasant face 
With misty vapours to be obscured, alace ! 

Where art thou. May, with June, thy sister sheen, 
Well bordered with daisies of delight? 
And gentle July, with thy mantle green, 
Enamelled with roses red and white? 
Now old and cold Januar, in despite, 
Reaves from us all pastime and pleasure. 
Alas! what gentle heart may this endure? 

O'ersoiled are with cloudes odious 

The golden skyes of the orient. 

Changing in sorrow our song melodious, 

Whilk we had wont to sing with good intent. 

Resounding to the heavenes firmament; 

But now our day is changed into night. 

With that they rose and flew out of my sight." 

In the course of his dream, Lindsay is conducted by Remembrance 
— not so very appropriate a personification in this case — to hell, 
but his description of it is entirely subordinate to satirical pur- 
poses, and contains about as little grandeur as could possibly be 
thrown into any verses on the situation. He proceeds at once 
to the popes, emperors, cardinals, prelates, priors, abbots, friars, 

1 Doleful. 2 Low. 3 Cursed. ^ Endurest. 



NORTH-COUNTRY BALLAD-MAKERS. II3 

monks, clerks, priests, and " bings " or heaps of all sorts of church- 
men, and specifies the causes of their perdition with an eye to 
personages still in the land of the living. Lindsay probably took 
the idea of this visit to the nether regions from Douglas's trans- 
lation of the ^neid. 



6. North-Country Ballad-Makers. 

The border-land between England and Scotland was the scene of 
many tragedies — of daring exploits, violent outrages, fierce acts of 
vengeance ; and the feuds, loves, and humours of the robust Bor- 
derers, if they found no great poet to commemorate them, found 
many sympathetic minstrels whose simple and often powerful verses 
were committed by oral recitation to the memories of the common 
folk. It was not till the middle of last century that any attempt 
was made to collect and print these popular treasures, and conse- 
quently we cannot be sure that we have any pieces as old as the 
fourteenth or even the fifteenth century in their original form. 
They must have been more or less modernised, if not otherwise 
altered, as they passed from minstrel to minstrel, and from one 
generation of reciters to another. Still, there is reason to believe 
that there were current in the North Country during those cen- 
turies, ballads upon most of the themes in our extant ballad- 
literature : Border battles such as Chevy Chase and Otterburne ; 
freebooting raids by such heroes as Kinmont Willie and William of 
Cloudesly ; outrages such as that committed by Edom of Gordon ; 
tragical jealousy, love between the children of enemies, love be- 
tween high and low, stepmother cruelty, deadly mistakes, such as 
we find in the ballads of Young Waters, Helen of Kirkconnell, 
Clerk Saunders, the Child of Elle, Annie of Lochroyan, Gil Morice, 
and many others ; the mysterious dealings of fairies with such 
heroes as Tamlane and True Thomas. In short, there circulated 
in that wild border-land in the ballad form, and steeped in a super- 
stitious atmosphere of thrilling omens and apparitions, such tales 
as afterwards formed the material of English tragedy and the 
romantic drama. And yet two curious things are to be remarked : 
that the North Country never produced a great dramatist ; and 
that no great English drama, with the exception, perhaps, of 
Macbeth, was based upon the incidents commemorated in these 
ballads. 



CHAPTER III. 
RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

Most of the poets discussed in this chapter received their main 
impulse from Italy. We have seen how the impulse given by 
Chaucer directly and through his immediate disciples gradually 
died away, sinking into the inane repetitions of Hawes, or awaken- 
ing the more individual energies of Skelton or Lindsay, who paid 
only a formal allegiance to the ruling powers, and substantially 
followed their own personal will : and we have now to deal with a 
more varied literature, which was largely influenced by the study 
of Italian. Not that Italian influences only were operative on the 
writers embraced in this chapter, but these were the main influ- 
ences. Nor did our poets follow at the heels of Italian masters 
with slavish imitation : still, they received from Italian masters 
their most potent stimulus. Wyat, Surrey, Sackville, Gascoigne, 
and even Spenser, while preserving their individual and national 
characteristics, formed themselves upon Italian models much more 
than upon any previous productions of the English imagination. 

Tottel's Miscellany, published in 1557, but containing the poet- 
ical efforts of the preceding quarter of a century, marks an epoch in 
English poetry. A collection of songs and sonnets by the courtiers 
of Henry VIIL, it is a fit spring prelude to the great Elizabethan 
season : of somewhat uncertain glory like April itself, struggling 
out with its sunshine and bird-singing through clouds and rain, yet 
on the whole victorious in hiding the rotten wrecks of winter with 
fresh vegetation. It was a hopeful thing for those days that the 
enthusiasm of poetry had seized upon the Court : before this time, 
though several noblemen had extended their patronage to poets, 
no person of rank in England had endeavoured to sing for himself. 
The new " courtly makers," as Puttenham calls them, of whom the 
two chiefs were Sir Thomas Wyat and Henry Earl of Surrey, had 
" travelled into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately meas- 
ures and style of the Italian poesy," and came home filled with the 



RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. II 5 

zeal of " novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, 
and Petrarch." Love was the natural theme of these ardent dis- 
ciples of the gay science ; and Petrarch was their model. Tottel's 
Miscellany is our first collection of love-lyrics : and after the 
droning narratives and worn-out rhymes of Lydgate and Hawes, 
the " depured streams," " golden beams," and " fiery leams," these 
eloquent and freshly worded complaints of the malice and treachery 
of Cupid are a blessed relief. 

It is not hard to discern general causes that must have favoured 
this brilliant efflorescence of English genius. The case of James I. 
of Scotland shows that a century before the time of Henry VIII., 
the royal families at least received some sort of literary education. 
But if we may trust the statement of Erasmus, it was not till the 
end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth 
that the English nobility began to be solicitous about the education 
of their children, and to engage as tutors the most eminent scholars 
that were to be procured. We may therefore suppose that about 
the middle of the reign of Henry VIII., our " young barbarians " 
began to revel in the spirit of newly-acquired freedom from igno- 
rance, and like the French after the Revolution, thirsted for an 
outlet to their energy. Their king had been educated under 
Skelton, a poet, however eccentric, and had imbibed among his 
many accomplishments a love for the generous arts. The cultiva- 
tion of poetry at the Court of Scotland might have shamed them 
into exertion ; but abroad they had in the brilliant Court of 
Lorenzo de Medici the traditions of a nobler example to excite 
their emulation. The interest of literary Europe had for some 
time centred in Italy. The tutors of the young English nobility 
had gone there to study the ancient classics under masters whose 
patient enthusiasm had gained the key to those treasures ; and 
coming home brimful of the Italian scenery and the Italian man- 
ners, as well as the wonderful old learning, had created among 
their pupils a universal desire to travel into this Land of Promise, 
and see its marvels with their own eyes. And there the youthful 
travellers found and brought to England with them a treasure 
more valuable even than had been imported by their sage in- 
structors : they found a new literature, palpitating with fresh life, 
and they were fired with ambition to emulate its beauties in their 
own tongue. This secondary and accidental result of the revival 
of learning was of more value to our literature than the primary 
movement itself: the most profound and wide-reaching impulses 
come from living sources. 

Why poetry at the Court of Henry took the form of songs and 
sonnets is a more perplexing question. Petrarch was probably 
known to Chaucer and to Lydgate ; but they were not moved by 
his example. I can venture on no deeper explanation than that 



Il6 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

Petrarch suited the taste of Wyat and Surrey as Boccaccio suited 
the taste of Chaucer and Lydgate. One might speculate at 
length and plausibly on the why and the wherefore, but with 
little satisfaction to one's self and probably less to one's readers. 
Among the poets included in this chapter most of the great 
Italians found congenial disciples : Sackville studied Dante ; Gas- 
coigne translated from the plays of Ariosto and the prose tales 
of Bandello ; and Spenser owed considerable obligations to the 
romantic epics of Ariosto and Tasso. I do not see that you can 
account for the choice of master except by supposing a natural 
affinity in the individual pupil. 

I. — Sir Thomas Wyat (i 503-1 541). 

The names of Surrey and Wyat are usually placed together as 
two great reformers of English verse, and often in such a way as 
to convey the impression that Wyat was the humble friend and 
imitator of Surrey. A close attention to dates and other circum- 
stances leads us to reverse this position of the " chieftains." 
Whoever was the first of Henry's " courtly makers," it seems 
tolerably clear that Wyat was the poetical father and not the 
pupil of Surrey. Wyat was born in 1503. He was admitted to 
St John's College, Cambridge, in 15 15, the year before the 
supposed date of Surrey's birth. In 1525, when Surrey was nine 
years old, and was living at Kenninghall under the care of a tutor, 
Wyat took a leading part in a great feat of arms at Greenwich, 
and was a favourite of Henry on account of his wit. There is a 
tradition that shortly afterwards he went to travel in Italy ; but 
this fact does not rest on contemporary authority. In 1537 he 
was sent as ambassador to the Court of Charles V. in Spain — 
Surrey's age at this time being twenty-one. Seeing that from 
1537 till his premature death in 1541, Wyat was with short 
intervals closely occupied in public business, we may reasonably 
presume that most of his poetry was written before 1537 ; we 
may at least be certain that he had studied French, Italian, and 
Spanish, and had begun the practice of poetry, before that date. 
If we suppose Surrey to have been the prime mover of Wyat's 
literary activity, we must suppose that accomplished young noble- 
man's influence on his senior to have begun at a very early age, 
and to have worked its perfect work before he was one-and- 
twenty. The thing is not perhaps impossible ; but it is much 
more likely that the influence proceeded the other way. In proof 
thereof, we may notice that Surrey addresses Wyat with the 
reverence of a pupil, thus — • 

" But I that knew what harboured in that head, 
What virtues rare were tempered in that breast, 



SIR THOMAS WYAT. 11/ 

Honour the place that such a jewel bred, 

And kiss the ground whereas thy corse doth rest. 

A head where wisdom mysteries did frame; 
"Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain, 
As on a stithe : where that some work of fame 
Was daily wrought, to turn to Britain's gain. 

A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme : 
That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit." 

In another of Surrey's sonnets, entitled "A Praise of Sir Thomas 
Wyat the elder, for his excellent learning," Wyat is compared to 
the deified heroes who introduced arts " in the rude age when 
knowledge was not rife ; " and putting together the praises be- 
stowed on him by Surrey and others, the dates of his life, and the 
known character of the man, we need have little doubt that Wyat 
was the first of Henry's courtly makers, and the initiator of the 
new movement in English poetry. Surrey's brilliant character, 
romantic life, and untimely fate, must not be allowed to rob his 
humbler friend of due honour.^ Wyat had more natural affinity 
with certain parts of the Southern character. His outward features, 
his "visage stern but mild," — dark complexion, long grave face, 
and retreating forehead, — do not belong to a common English 
type. He was probably selected as ambassador to the Spanish 
Court because his manners were suited to the position. His 
poems abound in non-English characteristics ; grave dignity and 
sweetness, delicate irony, temperate gaiety, absence of incontinent 
excitement under the influence of strong feehng. This greater 
natural affinity with his models, is the cause both of his being and 
of his appearing less original than Surrey, at the same time that it 
fitted him to lead the way in appropriating a vein of love-poetry 
new to English verse. 

There is perhaps no better way of bringing out the self-controlled 

1 Dr Nott's account of the relations between Wyat and Surrey is exceedingly 
hazy and inconsistent. He supposes Wyat to liave adopted the iambic (that is, the 
fall of the accent regularly on every second syllable) from Surrey; yet he also sup- 
poses certain poems in this metre to have been addressed to Anne Boleyn, and to 
have been written before 1530, when Surrey was only thirteen years old. He con- 
tends that Wyat's versification became smoother after he was in contact with Sur- 
rey, and that they translated certain sonnets together as it were for practice : yet 
one of those sonnets (which we shall presently quote) is perhaps the most irregular 
of all that Wyat wrote. Mr Guest also, usually an indisputable authority, is here 
found inadvertent. He makes Surrey the great leader in introducing new forms, 
ascribing to him the first use of the banded three-line stave, of ottava rivia, and of 
the sonnet. Yet Surrey never used ottava rima at all : and in another place, Mr 
Guest assigns a stave of one of Wyat's odes to the year 1520, at which time Surrey 
was only four years old. The prime cause of all these mistakes about the relations 
of the two poets is the fact of Surrey's name appearing first on the title-page of 
Tottel's collection, which was probably out of compliment to his rank. 



Il8 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

gravity of Wyat's spirit than comparing him with the more excitable 
and demonstrative Surrey in their translations of the same sonnet. 
They will illustrate at the same time another thing, and that is how 
thoroughly translators colour originals with their own feelings. The 
run of the thoughts being the same, we might easily overlook this ; 
but after a minute study and patient realisation of the effect of 
every epithet, the lines, which remain dead to the casual reader, 
come to life and assert their individuahty and difference of origin. 
Take the two in succession : — 

Wyat. 

" The long love that in my thought I harbour, 
And in my heart duth keep his residence, 
Into my face presseth with bold pretence, 

And there campeth, displaying his banner. 

She that me learns to love and to suffer. 

And wills that my trust, and lust's negligence 
Be reined by reason, shame, and reverence, 

With his hardiness takes displeasure. 

Wherewith Love to the heart's forest he fleeth, 
Leaving his enterprise with pain and cry, 

And there him hideth and not appeareth. 

What may I do when my master feareth, 
But in the field with him to live and die? 
For good is the life ending faithfully." 

Surrey. 

" Love that liveth and reigneth in my thought, 

That built his seat within my captive breast, 
Clad in the arms wherein with me he fought. 

Oft in my face he doth his banner rest. 
She that me taught to love and suffer pain. 

My doubtful hope and eke my hot desire 
With shamefast cloak to shadow and refrain, 

Her smiling face converteth straight to ire. 
And coward Love then to the heart apace 

Taketh his flight, whereas he lurks and plains 
His purpose lost, and dare not show his face. 

For my lord's guilt thus faultless bide I pains. 
Yet from my lord shall not my foot remove ; 
Sweet is his death that takes his end by love." 

Now compare the two versions as regards their predominant spirit. 
The master of Wyat's heart has long held dominion there, but 
fears to encounter the all-conquering lady : at last he musters con- 
fidence, presses boldly forward into the face " and there campeth, 
displaying his banner." A long period of quiescence is suddenly 
broken by a grand imposing movement. Surrey's tyrant is more 
energetic ; he strikes us as a more stirring blustering fellow ; he 
reigns actively, he has built a seat, he has the insignia of power 
about him ; and as soon as he has conquered the heart, he often 



SIR THOMAS WYAT. I I9 

sallies out and makes a show against the dreaded enemy. Whereas 
Wyat's master is normally reserved and self-contained, and rouses 
himself to one grand effort, Surrey's master is restlessly active. 
When Wyat's master does resolve to move, he fortifies himself 
in a camp, and unfolds his colours firmly ; Surrey's master seems 
to be always fiddling in and out with his banner. When we 
study their behaviour after the lady's angry look has put them to 
flight, we find the same contrast. Compare the three following 
lines in Surrey's sonnet with the corresponding three in Wyat's — 

" And coward Love then to the heart apace 

Taketh his flight, whereas he lurks and plains 
His purpose lost; and dare not show his face." 

Wyat's Love, when resolution fails him, retreats with inarticulate 
cry, and hides himself as it were in a forest : Surrey's Love, with 
the epithet " coward " on his back, lurks about bemoaning his 
failure. It is a small but important element in the effect that in 
the one sonnet Love's brief challenge in the face is an *' enterprise," 
undertaken after long misgiving, and abandoned with inarticulate 
despair : while in the other it is simply a " purpose," often entered 
upon, and often departed from with demonstrative timidity. 

Wyat's poems are full of melancholy, dispersed sometimes by a 
^rmer and more confident mood, but frequently deepening into 
bitterness. The poet has suffered much at the hands of Cupid — 
" his old dear enemy, his froward master." His youth has been 
shamefully abused by falsehood. He has been made a filing 
instrument to sharpen the advances of another. His mistress has 
been taken from him by a wealthier rival. If this, however, was 
his only passion,^ he must have suffered a great deal before it 
came to this end. Sometimes armed sighs stopped his way when 
he had resolved to pray to her for comfort ; sometimes his 
traitorous tongue betrayed him at a critical moment, and refused 
to proceed with his suit. He was constrained to cry for death or 
mercy. His bed was wet with his tears ; the snows could not 
redress his heat, and the sun could not abate his cold. He com- 
pares his love to the Alps — 

" Like unto these immeasurable mountains 
So is my painful life the burden of ire : 
For high be they and high is my desire : 
And I of tears and they be full of fountains." 



iHe complains that May was a peculiarly unhappy month to him : and seeing 
that Anne Boleyn was executed in May, and was certainly taken possession of 
by a more powerful man than Wyat, Dr Nott conjectures that she was the 
mistress of our poet's heart. We English take things so seriously that we can- 
not suppose Wyat's mistress to have been imaginary, or to have given him no 
just ground for his many complaints of her cruelty. 



120 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

He calls on woods, hills, and vales, to resound his plaints : he 

finds a voice for his anguish in the huge oaks that roar in the 

wind. His very life threatens to give way, if he receive no 
comfort — 

" So feeble is the thread, that doth the burden stay, 
Of my poor life, in heavy plight that falieth in decay : 
That but it have elsewhere some aid or some succours, 
The running spindle of my fate anon shall end his course." 

By-and-by, in the depth of his agonies, he shows some resentment 
against his unkind mistress — 

" What rage is this ? what furor ? of what kind ? 
"What power, what plague, doth weary thus my mind ? 
Within my bones to rankle is assigned 
What poison pleasant sweet ? 

Lo, see, mine eyes flow with continual tears : 
The body still away sleepless it wears : 
My food nothing my fainting strength repairs, 
Nor doth my limbs sustain. 

In deep wide wound, the deadly stroke doth turn, 
To cureless scar that never shall return. 
Go to : triumph : rejoice thy goodly turn : 
Thy friend thou dost oppress. 

Oppress thou dost, and hast of him no cure : 
Nor yet my plaint no pity can procure : 
Fierce tiger, fell, hard rock without recure, 
Cruel rebel to Love, 

Once may thou love, never be loved again : 
So love thou still and not thy love obtain : 
So wrathful love with spites of just disdain, 
May fret thy cruel heart." 

This resentful mood gains strength ; he begins to curse the time 
when he first fell in love — 

" When first mine eyes did view and mark, 
Thy fair beauty for to behold; 
And when mine ears listened to hark 
The pleasant words that thou me told : 

I would as then I had been free 

From ears to hear and eyes to see." 

He complains sadly that he has been deceived and forsaken : 
"they flee from me that sometime did me seek." He reminds 
himself bitterly of better days ; tortures himself with rapturous 
memories of her visits to him in his chamber. Then he makes an 
effort, and addresses her with resolution to know the worst — 



«ii 



SIR THOMAS WYAT. 121 

" Madame, withouten many words, 
Once am I sure you will or no ? 
And if you will, then leave your bords, 
And use your wit and show it so; 
For with a beck you shall me call. 
And if of one that burns alway, 
Ye have pity or ruth at all, 
Answer him fair with yea or nay. 
If it be yea, I shall be fain : 
If it be nay, friends as before. 
You shall another man obtain 
And I mine own and yours no more." 

And finally he summons up courage to take leave of her for ever : 
but his courageous resolution to part friends breaks down, proves 
to have been a self-delusion ; he cannot part from her with 
equanimity — 

" My lute, awake ! perform the last 
Labour that thou and I shall waste, 

And end that I have now begun. 
And when this song is sung and past 

My lute, be still, for I have done. 



Proud of the spoil that thou hast got, 
Of simple hearts through Loves shot, 

By whom unkind thou hast them won; 
Think not he hath his bow forgot 

Although my lute and I have done. 

Vengeance shall fall on thy disdain. 
That makest but game on earnest pain. 

Think not alone under the sun 
Unquit to cause thy lovers plain, 

Although my lute and I have done. 

May chance thee lie wither'd and old, 
In winter nights that are so cold. 

Plaining in vain unto the moon : 
Thy wishes then dare not be told. 

Care then who list, for I have done." ^ 

The gravity and dignity, the tones of mournful and bitter sweet- 
ness in Wyat's verse, are not a mere cultivated imitation of Italian 
models : they flow from a deep-seated constitutional sadness. 
Henry's favourite wit would not seem to have been a happy man. 
One of his sonnets is a defence of himself from a charge of varia- 
bility or moodiness. He is familiar with the concealment of the 
mind by colour contrary of feigned visage. Despondency is often 

1 This may have suggested Tennyson's " Lady Clara Vere de Vere," which differs 
considerably in tone, from its accusing the lady of presuming on her rank, and its 
recommendation of charitable works as nobler employment than flirtation. 



122 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION, 

his companion : he turns to his dumb dependents and fondles 
them with bitter reflection on the faithlessness of his human 
friends. 

" Lux, my fair falcon, and thy fellows all, 
How well pleasant it were your liberty ! 
Ye not forsake me, that fair mote you fall. 

But they that sometime liked my company, 
Like lice away from dead bodies they crawl, 

Lo ! what a proof in light adversity ! 
But ye, my birds, I swear by all your bells. 
Ye be my friends, and so be but few else." 

Active cynicism — cynicism no longer mournful, but kindled into 
delight by its own exercise — is seen in Wyat's satires, written 
in imitation of Horace. There are three of them, all in the terza 
rima or banded three-line stave : their titles are, " Of the mean 
and sure Estate, written to John Poins," " Of the Courtier's Life, 
written to John Poins," and " How to use the Court and himself 
therein, written to Sir Francis Bryan." These are our first English 
imitations of Horace ; and if Horace is taken as the standard of 
satire, Wyat has the best claim to the position of first English 
satirist, which is sometimes assigned to later satirists, Lodge, 
Donne, or Hall. 

Although Wyat preceded Surrey, and should not be robbed of 
the honour of that position, it is not to be pretended that he had 
Surrey's ease and accuracy of expression. He has indeed occa- 
sional felicities of higher and more delicate charm than anything 
to be found in Surrey ; single lines and parts of lines whose words 
have fallen together with the perfection of instinct. But he is in 
general awkward and embarrassed in his management of the com- 
plicated staves which he had the courage to attempt. His rhymes 
are exceedingly faulty, falling often upon unaccented inflectional 
terminations such as eih, ed, and ing, thus — 

" I fare as one escaped that fleeth. 
Glad he is gone, and yet still feareth 
Spied to be caught, and so dreadeth 
That he for nought his pain loseth." 

He makes ^///<?;- rhyme with higher and he7- ; maisfer with, nature ; 
accited with tryed and presented. In some of his pieces nearly 
one-fourth of the rhymes are of this nature. His metre, also, is 
questionable. He employs words with their foreign accents, and, 
generally, seems to study only to have the proper number of 
accents. This is the most charitable supposition : it might be 
contended that he simply counts syllables and arbitrarily puts an 
accent upon every second syllable without regard to its acknowl- 



EARL OF SURREY. 1 23 

edged accent. And with all these licences he has some difficulty 
in filling up the measure of his stanzas. It is, however, only in 
his sonnets, and his compositions in terza rima and ottava 7'ima, 
that these defects appear. His songs are no less flowing than 
Surrey's, and to the full as musical. In them he moves like a 
runner escaped from a thicket into the open plain. He " sends 
his complaints and tears to sue for grace " with genuine lyric 
rapture — 

" Pass forth my wonted cries 
Those cruel ears to pierce, 
Which in most hateful wise 

Do still my plaints reverse. 
Do you, my tears, also 

So wet her barren heart, 
That pity there may grow 
And cruelty depart." 



II. — Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516-1547), 

The editor of Tottel's Miscellany speaks of " the honourable 
style of the noble Earl of Surrey, and the weightiness of the 
deep-witted Sir Thomas Wyat the elder's verse." There is some 
discrimination in the epithets. Surrey has not the deep and subtle 
feelings of Wyat ; but he has a captivating sweetness, a direct 
eloquence, a generous impetuosity, that make him a much more 
universal favourite. 

Warton dwells at some length on Surrey's life as throwing light 
upon the character and subjects of his poetry. The prevailing 
errors in Surrey's biography may have had something to do with 
the misconception of his position in literature. If he had, as was at 
one time the accepted belief, been engaged in the battle of Flodden 
(three years before he was born), he might well have taken prece- 
dence of Wyat. Warton does not fall into this mistake : but he 
affirms that Surrey was educated at Windsor with Henry's natural 
son, the Duke of Richmond ; and repeats the fiction of Thomas 
Nash that Surrey made the tour of Europe as a knight-errant, 
upholding against all comers the superiority of his mistress 
Geraldine. The facts are these. From his birth till 1524, Henry 
Howard lived in his father's house — in the summer time at 
Tendring Hall, Suffolk, in the winter time at Hunsdon, in Hert- 
fordshire : he is not known to have been the companion of the 
youthful Duke of Richmond till their education (in the limited 
meaning of the word) was completed. Surrey's boyhood was 
probably passed at Kenninghall, under the care of a tutor : the 
pleasures that he recounts as passed in Windsor with a king's 
son in his childish years were probably not enjoyed till 1534, by 
which time both had been at Cambridge, had taken part in royal 



124 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

pageants, and had been married, or at least affianced, to noble 
ladies. His itinerant championship of Geraldine is purely fabu- 
lous. The lady is conjectured to have been Elizabeth Fitzgerald, 
daughter of the Earl of Kildare : but seeing that she was only 
four years old when Surrey married in 1532, and was herself 
married to Sir Anthony Brown at the age of fifteen in 1543, we 
may believe with Dr Nott that the passion was altogether ideal, 
and perhaps the effect rather than the cause of Surrey's turn for 
sonnet-writing. Belonging to the most powerful family in Eng- 
land, Surrey was a most prominent figure at Court : in the festiv- 
ities at Henry's marriage with Anne of Cleves in 1540, he was 
the leader of one of the sides in the tournament. His imperious 
spirit more than once committed him to durance vile : once for 
challenging to a duel, and again for breaking the windows of the 
citizens of London under the pretence (serious or comical) of 
alarming their guilty minds with fear of approaching Divine 
vengeance. He held commands in the unimportant wars with 
Scotland and France that occupied the later years of the reign of 
Henry, and distinguished himself by his personal courage. In 
December 1546, at the instance of certain enemies, he was lodged 
in the Tower ; and in the January following was brought to trial 
for high treason, condemned, and executed. He was charged 
with having " falsely, maliciously, and traitorously set up and bore 
the arms of Edward the Confessor." 

Surrey is described as a somewhat small man, strongly knit, 
with a dark piercing eye and a composed thoughtful countenance. 
He was much more im[)etuous and gushing than Wyat : proud, 
confident, indiscreet in word and action : profuse in his expenses, 
sumptuous in apparel and mode of living : courteous and affable 
to inferiors, haughty to equals, and willing to acknowledge no 
superior. 

Surrey's originality was not of the fastidious kind that rejects 
thoughts and images simply because they have occurred to a pre- 
decessor. His imagery is not strikingly new. In his irresistible 
energetic way he made free use of whatever suggested itself in 
the moment of composition, no matter where it might have come 
from. He borrowed many phrases, many images, and many hints 
of phrases and images, from his friend Wyat.^ What he bor- 

1 It will at once be asked — How do we know that Wyat was the lender and 
not the borrower? Apart from the probabilities of dates, we know from such 
small facts as the following : Surrey assigns to Wyat the significant figure that the 
scar of a severe wound is never effaced ; and in the poem containing that figure 
we find several other expressions that are used by Surrey. Such a fact, of course, 
is not conclusive ; it might plausibly be turned the other way. That it points in the 
way here indicated appears farther from the form of Surrey's reference ; he quotes 
Wyat as a master : — 

"Yet Solomon said, the wronged shall recure: 
But Wyat said true, the scar doth aye endure." 



EARL OF SURREY. 125 

rowed, however, he passed through his own mint. He vividly 
reahsed in his own experience the feehngs that other poets pro- 
fessed, and the imagery they employed to give expression to their 
feelings. At times, indeed, he seems like a spasmodic poet to be 
agitating himself for the sake of the experience. All his poetry 
thus displays a modified originality. He probably would not have 
observed what he delineates, nor would he have thought of the 
means of delineation, without an obtrusive stimulus, a broad hint ; 
but once his eyes were turned to the proper quarter, and he was 
told, as it were, what to look for, he used his own eyesight inde- 
pendently, and cast about him for the means of giving expression 
to what he saw and felt. He had an energetic, versatile mind, 
singularly open to impressions and impulses : versifying the moods 
and circumstances of love in songs and sonnets was merely one 
of the channels that his energy was guided into ; and once set 
agoing he versified in his own way, just as in war he aspired to 
direct operations in his own way. 

Compared with Wyat, Surrey strikes one as having much 
greater affluence of words — the language is more plastic in his 
hands. When his mind is full of an idea, he pours it forth with 
soft voluble eloquence ; he commands such abundance of words 
that he preserves with ease a uniform measure. Uniformity, 
indeed, is almost indispensable to such abundance : we read him 
with the feehng that in a " tumbling metre " his fluency would 
run away with him. Such impetuous affluent natures as his need 
to be held in with the bit and bridle of uniformity. A calm, 
composed man like Wyat, with a fine ear for varied melodies, may 
be trusted to elaborate tranquilly irregular and subtle rhythms ; 
to men like Surrey there is a danger in any medium between 
"correctness" and Skeltonian licence. 

Surrey goes beyond Wyat in the enthusiasm of nature, in the 
worship of bud and bloom. In the depths of his amorous despair, 
the beauty of the tender green, and the careless happiness of the 
brute creation, arrest his eye, and detain him for certain moments 
from his own sorrow. His most frequently quoted sonnet is a 
picture of the general happiness of nature in spring, artfully pro- 
longed to the last line, when his own misery bursts in, refusing 
any longer to be comforted or held at a distance with other 
interests. There is great freshness in his enjoyment of spring ; 
he describes what he has seen and felt : — 

"When Summer took in hand the winter to assail, 

With force of might, and virtue great, his stormy blasts to quail; 

And when he clothed fair the earth about with green, 
And every tree new garmented that pleasure was to seen : 

Mine heart gan new revive, and changed blood did stur 
Me to withdraw my winter woe, that kept within the durre. 



126 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

Abroad, quod my desire, assay to set thy foot, 
Where thou shalt find the summer sweet, for sprung is every root: 

And to thy health, if thou wert sick in any case. 
Nothing more good than in the spring the air to feel a space. 

There thou shalt hear and see all kinds of birds y-\vrought. 
Well tune their voice with warble small, as Nature hath them taught. 

Thus pricked me my lust the sluggish house to leave, 
And for my health I thought it best, such counsel to receive. 

So on a morrow forth, unwist of any wight, 
I went to prove how well it would my heavy burden light. 

And when I felt the air so pleasant round about, 
Lord ! to myself how glad I was that I had gotten out. 

There might I see how Ver had every blossom bent; 
And eke the new betrothed birds y-coupled how they went. 

And in their songs methought, they thanked Nature much, 
That by her licence all that year to love their hap was such." 

Nature, however, was not always a soothing bahti to his restless- 
ness : her sweet dews fell unheeded on the tumult of his veins ; 
his hurrying thoughts would not obey the admonition of her 
stately movements. In the repose of midnight his complaint 
rose with unabated anguish : — 

" Alas ! so all things now do hold their peace ! 

Heaven and earth disturbed in nothing: 
The beasts, the air, the birds their song do cease; 

The nightes chair the stars about doth l)ring : 
Calm is the sea; the waves work less and less. 

So am not I, whom love alas doth wring, 
Bringing before my face the great increase 

Of my desires, whereat I M'eep and sing. 
In joy and wo as in a doubtful ease. 

For my sweet thoughts sometime do pleasure bring, 
But by-and-by the cause of my disease 

Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting. 
When that I think w^hat grief it is again 
To Uve and lack the thing should rid my pain." 

What a contrast to the repose of Greek sculpture ! how fine a 
subject for Mr Matthew Arnold's lesson of " Self-Dependence " ! 

It is exceedingly difficult to trace differences of character in 
the love-poems of Surrey and Wyat. VVe find in Surrey a 
greater richness of circumstance and epithet, a more glowing 
colour; but we cannot lay our finger upon any one mood in 
either poet, and say with confidence that we should be surprised 
to find it in the other. For one thing Surrey wrote comparatively 
few poems, so that we have no assurance of having boxed the 
compass of his moods ; and for another thing, it was part of his 
energetic versatility to be able to throw himself into »an imaginary 
situation upon any accidental hint, and compose a song or sonnet 
to correspond. 



EARL OF SURREY. 12/ 

Surrey, upon the whole, strikes us as more hght-hearted and 
ebulHent ; less deeply penetrated by the earnestness of passion. 
None of Wyat's songs open with the ringing strength and joyous 
brightness of Surrey's " praise of his love, wherein he reproveth 
them that compare their ladies with his : " — 

" Give place, ye lovers, here before 

That spent your boasts and brags in vain : 

My lady's beauty passeth more 

The best of yours, I dare well sain, 

Than doth the sun the candle light, 

Or brightest day the darkest night. 

And thereto hath a truth as just, 

As had Penelope the fair; 
For what she saith, ye may it trust, 

As it by writing sealed were. 
And virtues hath she many mo 
Than I with pen have skill to show. 

I could rehearse, if that I would, 

The whole efifect of Nature's plaint, 
"When she had lost the perfect mould. 

The like to whom she could not paint : 
With wringing hands how she did cry, 
And what she said, I know it, I."^ 

Compliments that flow with such a current, and sparkle with such 
bubbles, do not come from the depths. Again, Wyat is too 
intensely in earnest to love on without hope of success : he seeks 
after a definite sign, and when the signs seem unfavourable, bitterly 
takes refuge in self-sufficing pride. Surrey, on the other hand, 
with light-hearted generosity, is content only to be hers " although 
his chance be nought;" and with a hopefulness that shows how 
slender a hold the passion has upon him, finds consolation in 
thinking of the long toils and ultimate triumph of the Greeks 
before Troy. Once more, when Wyat suspects his lady of playing 

1 The sonnet by Fiorenzuola, from which this is imitated, was a favourite with 
the translators and imitators of the sixteenth century. There are other two ver- 
sions of it in Tottel's Miscellany, one of them attributed to Heywood, which opens 
with the following rather pretty staves : — 

" Give place you ladies, and begone! 
Boast not yourselves at all: 
For here at hand p.pproacheth one 
Whose face will stain you all. 

The virtue of her lovely looks 

Excels the precious stone: 
I wish to have none other books 

To read or look upon. 

In each of her two crystal eyes 

Smileth a naked boy; 
It would you all in heart suffice 

To see that lamp of joy." 



128 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

false, he mocks his own stupidity, and gravely resolves to be wiser 
in future ; beneath his assumed indifference of tone, we see that 
the lesson has been bitter. In a similar situation, Surrey prides 
himself upon his acuteness in seeing through the practices of faith- 
less women : — 

" Too dearly had I bought my green and youthful years, 
If in mine age I could not tind when craft for love appears. 
And seldom though I come in court among the rest, 
Yet can I judge in colours dim as deep as can the best." 

In another poem he is represented by the editor of 'Tottel' as 
"SL careless man, scorning and describing the subtle usage of 
women toward their lovers." Still, all these signs may be decep- 
tive, and one would not care to dogmatise on the difference between 
the two lovers. 

None of Wyat's poems are dramatic : he speaks for himself; he 
does not put himself in the place of others and express their emo- 
tions for them. Two or three of Surrey's poems, on the other 
hand, have this dramatic turn. He sets himself to express, in 
two different metres, the complaint of a lady whose lover is absent 
upon the sea — an early Mariana. The following are three staves 
of the first complaint : — 

" When other lovers in arms across, 

Rejoice their chief delight; 
Drowned in tears to mourn my loss, 

I stand the bitter night, 
In my window where I may see, 
Before the winds how the clouds flee. 
Lo, what a mariner Love hath made me ! ^ 

And in green waves when the salt flood 

Doth rise by rage of wind : 
A thousand fancies in that mood 

Assail my restless mind. 
Alas ! now drencheth my sweet foe, 
That with the spoil of my heart did go, 
And left me, but alas ! why did he so? 

And when the seas wax calm again, 

To chase fro me annoy; 
My doubtful hope doth cause me plain. 

So dread cuts off my joy. 
Thus is my wealth mingled with wo, 
And of each thought a doubt doth grow, 
Now he comes! will he come? alas! no, no." 

The forms of sonnet used by Wyat and Surrey are various ; 
they were experimenting, and neither of them seems to have been 
fascinated by any one form. They several times attempted con- 



EARL OF SURREY, 



129 



structing the fourteen lines throughout upon two rhymes, as in 
Surrey's — " Alas ! so all things now do hold their peace " (p. 1 26) ; 
a form of no particular beauty, and attractive to verse-writers 
chiefly as an exercise of skill in rhyming. The two most important 
types are seen in their rival versions of the same sonnet, quoted 
at p. 118. Wyat follows the arrangement observed by Petrarch, 
and thus loosely spoken of as the Italian form ; Surrey, the 
arrangement adopted by Shakespeare, and thus loosely spoken of 
as the English form. The fourteen lines of Wyat's version are 
divided into two parts : first a stanza of eight lines, consisting of 
two quatrains banded together by common rhymes ; then a stanza 
of six lines, consisting of two tercettes, also banded together by 
common rhymes. In this type of sonnet, a certain variety was 
permitted in the disposition of the rhymes within these hmits : in 
the banded quatrains, they might either be alternate, or successive 
as in Wyat's sonnet ; and in the tercettes there might be two 
rhymes or three connected in any order that the sonneteer could 
devise. The form of Surrey's version, the English form, is an 
easier arrangement, which came into use in Italy in the beginning 
of the sixteenth century. In it the division into two stanzas is 
broken up, and the fourteen lines arranged in three independent 
quatrains closed in by a couplet. As we shall see, the form was 
adopted and regularly used by Daniel for his " Sonnets to Delia " ; 
and from him was adopted by Shakespeare. Before the " Sonnets 
to Delia," the Italian form was rather the favourite with English 
sonneteers : it was employed constantly by Sidney. 

Surrey's poem composed during his imprisonment in Windsor, 
is claimed by Dr Nott, who edits Surrey with more than a biog- 
rapher's enthusiasm, as the first specimen of our elegiac stave — 
four heroic lines rhyming alternately. This poem contains twelve 
such staves. Curiously enough, however, the whole is shut in 
with a final couplet, so that the poem is really a sonnet with 
twelve quatrains instead of three. It is a confirmation of Mr 
Guest's intrinsically probable conjecture that the elegiac stave 
arose from the breaking up of the sonnet into easier forms. Mr 
Guest, however, is wrong in saying that the final stage of dropping 
the couplet did not come on till after Milton. Elegiacs without 
any such appendage are found in the poems of Robert Greene. 

The chief feather in Surrey's plume as a verse-writer is his 
introduction of blank verse. He employed it in his translation of 
the Second and Fourth Books of the yEneid, which is memorable 
also as an indication of the growing study of the ancient classics 
in England. Although Gawain Douglas is a prior claimant to the 
honour of producing the first English translation of an ancient 
classic (if Douglas's language is entitled to be called English), 
Surrey has sufficient honour in his choice of the unrhymed form. 



130 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

About the same time the ItaHans were beginning to experiment in 
dispensing with rhyme ; and Surrey had the good fortune, or the 
good sense, to apply to the translation of the great Roman epic 
the form that has since been established as English heroic verse. 
His blank verse is described by Conington as a good beginning, 
but *' not entitled to any very high positive praise," being " languid 
and monotonous, and sometimes unmetrical and inharmonious." 
Surrey's direct knowledge of the classics preserved him as it pre- 
served Wyat and others of the time from the gross mediaeval 
blunders : yet it is significant of his being only among the pioneers 
that in his praise of Wyat he speaks of " Dan Homer's rhymes," 
" who feigned gests of heathen princes sung." 

We should not omit to notice, among other evidences of Surrey's 
searching versatility and eager activity seeking vent in many forms, 
that he made an attempt also at pastoral poetry. His " Com- 
plaint of a dying Lover refused upon his Lady's unjust mistaking 
of his writing," is put into the mouth of a shepherd. In this he 
followed the example of the Italian imitators of Virgil. His 
metre seems to be a modification of the old ballad form of long 
rhyming couplets : he shortens the first fine of the couplet by an 
accent, or two syllables, thus — 

" In Winter's just return, when Boreas gan his reign, 
And every tree unclothed fast as Nature tauglit them plain; 
In misty morning dark, as sheep are then in hold, 
I hied me fast, it set me on, my sheep for to unfold. 
And as it is a thing that lovers have by fits, 
Under a palm I heard one cry as he had lost his wits," 

III. — IVn'/ers of Mysteries, Moralities, " Mot^al Interludes'''' : 

John Bale. 

The writers that fall under this section lay wholly out of the 
current of Italian influences. The common stage did not feel 
these influences till later. The primitive English drama was as 
little affected by the causes that furthered the poetry of Wyat 
and Surrey as it had been a century and a half before, by the 
movement of which the main English outcome was Chaucer. With 
its firm hold of popular sympathies, through its ministration to 
simple inartificial wants, it continued to flourish when the spirit 
of Chaucer decayed, and maintained a certain struggle for exist- 
ence even after the full maturity of the Elizabethan drama, of 
which it had, as we shall see, some claim to be considered the 
parent. Throughout its lease of life it was a direct response to 
a popular demand : it knew its audience, and gave them what 
they desired. 

In one view, indeed, this rude religious drama cannot be held to 



JOHN BALE. 131 

have remained unaffected by surrounding influences. The Moral- 
plays, in which the characters were personified virtues and vices 
— Reason, Repentance, Avarice, Sensuality, Folly, &c. — may be 
regarded as a modification produced, not by a development fi-om 
within, but by the action of neighbouring forces. As the materials 
of one section of Chaucer's poetry were the offspring of a union 
between Abstraction and Sense, so the moral-plays may be looked 
upon as a cross between Abstraction and the Miracle-plays. It 
really is immaterial to this view what conclusion we adopt as to 
the precise transition from miracle-play to moral-play, whether 
we suppose the transition to have taken place by the gradual 
introduction of abstract personifications among Scriptural and 
legendary individuals, or suppose it to have taken place at a leap 
by the use of moral tales of personifications instead of Scripture 
and legend as subjects for dramatic representation. In either 
view, we are at liberty to regard the transition as an encroach- 
ment made by the abstracting tendency of the Middle Ages 
upon a simple popular entertainment. 

Moral- plays, in whatever way they were suggested, were com- 
mon throughout the fifteenth century, and had not quite died 
out at the end of the sixteenth. They, as well as Mysteries, were 
largely used by the advocates and the opponents of the Reforma- 
tion to promote their respective views. To give some idea of 
their nature, we may look at " The World and the Child," Mundus 
et Infans, which is called "a proper new interlude," showing the 
estate of childhood and manhood.^ It has no regard for the 
unity of time : it conducts a child from the cradle to the grave 
without change of scene. It has no plot : it is really a descrip- 
tive or panoramic dialogue, in which the Prince of this World 
holds conversations with a human creature at various stages of its 
existence, giving his commands to it, and receiving at the end of 
every seven years an account of its proceedings. The outline is 
something hke this. Mundus enters boasting of his palace, his 
stalled horses, his riches, his command of mirth and game. He 
is prince of power and of plenty ; and he smites with poverty 
all that come not when he calls. Infans next tells us that he 
is a child hke other children, " gotten in game and in great sin," 
and complains of his nakedness and poverty. He beseeches Mun- 
dus to clothe him and feed him — 

" Sir, of some comfort I you crave 
Meat and cloth my life to save, 
And I your true servant shall be." 



1 Mr Collier gives a particular account of "Nature," a morality by Henry 
Medwall, chaplain to Cardinal Morton. — Hist, of Dram. Poet. ii. 298. See Mr 
Collier's work for a complete account of our primitive drama. 



132 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

Mundus hearkens to his prayer, gives him gay garments, names 
him Wanton, and bids him return for further consideration when 
fourteen years are come and gone. Wanton is dehghted, and 
repeats with great zest the various amusements and tricks of 
sportive boydom — top-spinning, biting and kicking, making mouths 
at his seniors and skipping off, telhng hes, dancing, playing at 
cherry-pit, whisthng, pkmdering orchards, harrying nests. It is 
considered quite enough for Wanton simply to recapitulate those 
recreations to give the audience to understand that he has lived 
through them ; and after the recapitulation he says — 

" But, sirs, when I was seven year of age 
I was sent to the World to take wage, 
And this seven year I've been his page 
And kept his comniandement. 

Now I will wend to the World and worthy emperor. 
Hail, Lord of great honour ! 

This seven year I have served you in hall and in bower 
With all my true intent." 

Mundus has not left the stage all this time, and he returns a 
gracious answer, calling Wanton his darling dear. He christens 
him anew Lust and Liking, and bids him enjoy all game and 
glee and gladness, and come again at the end of seven years. 
After another speech, enumerating the doings of lusty youth, 
Lust and Liking returns aged twenty- one, ready for further orders. 
Mundus christens him Manhood, and bids him worship seven 
kings, which are no other than the seven deadly sins — Pride, 
Envy, Wrath, Covetousness, Sloth, Gluttony, Lechery. Man- 
hood promises to honour them all, and presently announces him- 
self a stalwart and stout lord, of wide dominion and wide fame. 
While he is boasting of his might and main. Conscience passes by, 
and they have a dialogue. Conscience discoursing good counsel, 
meeting at first with much insolence, but ultimately succeeding in 
making Manhood very uncomfortable. Manhood is glad when 
Conscience says farewell, although he admits the truth of what 
he has said. Folly next enters, brimful of audacious imperti- 
nence, and after some disputation, persuades Manhood that he is 
a better leader than Conscience. Just as Manhood is about to 
follow Folly, Conscience returns, and finding it impossible to 
restrain Manhood, calls in the aid of Perseverance. Before Per- 
severance has well explained his functions. Manhood returns in 
the guise of Age, lamenting his bowed body and his former service 
of the seven deadly sins. In this mood he is converted, receives 
the name of Repentance, and so the play ends. 

Another piece of this class, with more pretence to plot and 
vivacity, is " Hick-Scorner," also written during the reign of Henry 
VIII. The personages are Freewill and Imagination (two dissolute 



JOHN BALE. 133 

characters, companions of Hick-Scorner) ; Pity (who tries to medi- 
ate between these two worthies when they quarrel, and is seized 
upon, after the usual fate of peace-makers, by both the wranglers 
and put in the stocks) ; and Perseverance and Contemplation (who 
succeed in reclaiming Freewill and Imagination to a virtuous life). 
This play gives a really lively picture of manners ; Hick-Scorner 
representing the travelled gallant ; Freewill and Imagination, the 
'' rufflers," profligate swaggering fellows, not very particular in 
their ways of making money ; Pity, the good man who laments the 
degeneracy of the age, and thinks that wickedness was never so 
prevalent as in his own time ; and Perseverance and Contempla- 
tion, ideals of virtuous conduct and humane desire for the good 
of mankind. 

The influence of this popular drama in forming public opinion 
was deeply respected by Henry and his successors, who framed 
acts and issued proclamations lamenting the inquietation of their 
people by diversity of opinion, and interdicting all plays that had 
not received the royal sanction. Both Mysteries and Moralities 
were used to leaven the popular mind with sound doctrine. 

John Bale (1495-15 63), a zealous reformer, favoured by Crom- 
well, forced to flee the country after his death in 1540, recalled by 
Edward VI. and made Bishop of Ossory, exiled under Mary, re- 
stored once more at the accession of Elizabeth, wrote no less than 
nineteen plays to promote the Reformation. " God's Promises," 
reprinted in Dodsley's Old Plays, was written in 1538, and entitled 
" A Tragedy or Interlude, manifesting the chief promises of God 
unto man by all ages in the old law, from the fall of Adam to the 
incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ." The composition is much 
more sohd than that of the " World and the Child," but the plan 
of the work is very much the same. It is divided into seven Acts, 
in each of which God sustains a dialogue with a Scriptural patri- 
arch or a prophet : Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, 
John the Baptist. Each of the Acts begins with a declaration of 
God's anger against man, proceeds with deprecating entreaties from 
the representative of man, and ends with a promise of mercy. The 
pious author thus embraces within his play the chief promises of a 
Saviour, as made to Adam, Abraham, David, and Isaiah. Three 
other mysteries by Bale are extant — "The Three Laws, of Nature, 
Moses, and Christ;" "John the Baptist's Preaching in the Wil- 
derness ; " and " The Temptation of Christ." This last is called 
by the author a comedy.^ 

1 Bale, says Mr Collier, was the first to apply, or rather to misapply, the words 
"tragedy" and "comedy" to dramatic representations in English. Mr Collier 
attributes to him also the curious play Ki>'g Johan, a " morality" with a political 
intention, and historical characters mixed with such abstractions as " Civil Order," 
"Treason," and " Verity." — Camden Society, 1838. 



134 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

Bishop Bale used Scripture-plays seriously for the purpose of 
disseminating his own views of Biblical truth. It is to his plays 
that we must go if we wish to keep up the idea that the object and 
function of mysteries was to diffuse among the people a knowledge 
of Holy Writ. Moral-plays were also utilised by the champions of 
the Reformation. In the battle against the old faith, mysteries 
and moralities may be said to have served two separate functions 
— mysteries being employed in the constructive work of spreading 
the light of the Bible, and moralities in the destructive work of 
ridicuhng the priests and tenets of Roman Catholicism. In the 
moral-play of " Lusty Juventus," written during the reign of Ed- 
ward VI., the ministers and the ritual of Roman Catholicism are 
represented as being the offspring of hypocrisy, the daughter of 
the devil, and he is represented as complaining that the Reforma- 
tion is taking away his choicest instruments. It was natural that 
when Mary ascended the throne, her party should employ the same 
organ to play a very different tune. Under Mary it was the new 
faith and its professors that had to be discredited and made odious. 
In the " Interlude of Youth," Youth is seduced by the ordinary 
means of Riot and Pride, and reclaimed by Charity with sound 
Catholic doctrine. And in a " merry interlude, entitled Respublica,^'' 
Reformation figures as an alias of Oppression, with Insolence and 
Adulation as his comrades ; and the three behave so badly, that 
Nemesis comes down from heaven with her four fair ladies to 
chastise them, and redress their perversion of " all right and all 
order of true justice." The three iniquities pay court to Avarice, 
a touchy old gentleman. Reformation says — 

" And to you have we borne hearty favours alvvay." 

To which Avarice replies shortly and sharply — 

" And I warrant you hanged for your labours one day." 

Whereupon Reformation and Adulation chime in together, but get 
little encouragement from their irascible patron — 

" R. ^ A. Even as our God we have alway honoured you. 

Avar. And e'en as your God I have aye succoured you. 

R. 6^ A. We call you our founder by all holy hallows. 

Avar. Founder me no foundering, but beware the gallows." 

This employment of a rude drama for political and religious 
purposes is heavy reading, now that the freshness of its applica- 
tions is gone. It has little interest as literature side by side with 
the poetry of Wyat and Surrey. Occasionally, however, the 
dreary waste is relieved by a sparkling interval. There are two 
songs in " Lusty Juventus " which step out of their lifeless sur- 



JOHN HEYWOOD. 1 35 

roundings, and challenge comparison with the new poetry of the 
period. They appeal to us as things of native growth against the 
imports of the Italian school. They are genuinely Enghsh, and 
have something of the quality of the snatches of song interspersed 
through the mature Elizabethan drama. The first of them is the 
opening of the play, and is sung by Lusty Juventus himself upon 
his entrance : — 

"In a herbere green asleep whereas I lay, 
The birds sang sweet in the midst of the day; 
I dreamed fast of mirth and play. 

In youth is pleasure — in youth is pleasure, 

Methought I walked still to and fro, 
And from her company I could not go; 
But when 1 waked, it was not so. 

In youth is pleasure — in youth is pleasure. 

Therefore my heart is surely pight, 
Of her alone to have a sight, 
Which is my joy and heart's delight. 

In youth is pleasure — in youth is pleasure." 

The other is in a similar strain : — 

" Why should not youth fulfil his own mind, 
As the course of nature doth him bind ? 
Is not everything ordained to do his kind ? 
Report me to you — report me to you. 

Do not the flowers spring fresh and gay, 
Pleasant and sweet in the month of May? 
And when their time cometh they fade away. 
Report me to you — report me to you. 

Be not the trees in winter bare? 
Like unto their kind, such they are. 
And when they spring their fruits declare. 
Report me to you — report me to you. 

What should youth do with the fruits of age 
But live in pleasure in his passage ? 
For when age cometh his lusts will 'suage. 
Report me to you — report me to you. 

Why should not youth fulfil his own mind, 
As the course of nature doth him bind? " 



IV. — John Heywood : "Merry Interludes'' — The Four P's — 

Jlier sites. 

The " merry interludes " of John Heywood, an epigrammatist 
and noted jester or wit, in great favour with Mary, but driven 



136 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

abroad, on the accession of Elizabeth, by his adherence to the 
Roman Catholic faith, lie between moralities, otherwise called 
'* moral interludes," and the regular comedy. They have not 
the plot of regular comedy, and they are superior to moralities 
in the exhibition of character, because they bring on the stage 
not personified abstractions but representatives of professions. In 
spirit they have much in common with the modern farce, being 
designed for the same purpose of keeping an audience in broad 
enjoyment for a short time. Heywood's "merry interludes" are 
fine examples of broad, boisterous, healthy English humour. He 
took a pride in his own " mad merry wit." 

"Art thou Hey wood, with thy mad merry wit? 

Yea ! forsooth, Master, that name is even hit. 
Art thou Hey wood, that apphest mirth more than thrift? 

Yes, sir, I take merry mirth a golden gift. 
Art thou Hey wood, that hast made many mad plays? 

Yea, many plays, few good works in my days." 

It seems a strange thing that this madcap should have suffered 
persecution for his religious faith : it is a parallel to the contem- 
porary paradox of the facetious but fundamentally serious Sir 
Thomas More. From his interludes one might suppose Hey- 
wood's leanings to have been the other way — towards the Re- 
fornners rather than the Papists : in his extant plays, priests, 
palmers, and pardoners are the chief butts of his ridicule. One 
of them — " The Pardoner, the Friar, the Curate, and neighbour 
Pratt" — exhibits a struggle between a Pardoner and a Friar for 
the temporary use of the Curate's church, and the vain efforts of 
the Curate and neighbour Pratt to keep the peace. Another, en- 
titled " A merry play between John the husband, Tib the wife, 
and Sir Jhan the priest," has for its subjects a henpecked hus- 
band and a clerical paramour. The main fun of a third — " The 
Four P's, or the Palmer, the Pardoner, the Potecary, and the Ped- 
lar " — turns upon engaging three notorious liars in a competition 
to prove which can tell the biggest lie, the fourth standing by as 
judge. 

The "Four P's," which is reprinted in Dodsley's Old Plays, is 
brimful of bright broad humour. The Palmer enters and tells 
what he is, where he has travelled, and why he goes on pilgrim- 
age. So far all is serious : we have a pious man before us, enu- 
merating his pilgrimages, and crossing himself as he repeats his 
devout motives : — 

" To these, with many other one. 
Devoutly have I prayed and gone, 
Praying to them to pray for me 
Unto the blessed Trinity. 



JOHN HEYWOOD. I 37 

By whose prayers and my daily pain 
I trust the sooner to obtain 
For my salvation, grace, and mercy. 
For be ye sure I think assuredly 
Who seeketh saints for Christes sake 
And namely such as pain do take 
On foot to punish their frail body, 
Shall thereby merit more highly 
Than by anything done by man." 

But the Pardoner enters, and dissipates the devout atmosphere 
with mad spirit. " For all your labour and ghostly intent," he 
says to the Palmer, " you return as wise as you went." The pil- 
grim should have come to him. 

"Now mark in this what wit ye have. 
To seek so far and help so nigh; 
Even here at home is remedy : 
For at your door myself doth dwell 
"Who could have saved your soul as well 
As all your wide wand'ring shall do, 
Though ye went thrice to Jericho. 

Give me but a penny or twopence, 

And as soon as the soul departeth hence, 

In half-an-hour or three-quarters at the most, 

The soul is in heaven with the Holy Ghost." 

The Apothecary now enters with an irreverent inquiry, and 
proceeds to boast with coarse strong humour that he is of more 
service to the health of souls than either Pardoner or Palmer. 

"No soul, ye know, entreth heaven gate 
Till from the body he be separate: 
And whom have ye known die honestly 
Without help of the Potecary? 

Since of our souls the multitude 
I send to heaven when all viewed, 
Who should but I then all together 
Have thank of all their coming thither?" 

And the Pardoner and the Potecary assert their rival claims as 
follows : — 

** Par. If ye killed a thousand in an hour space, 

When come they to heaven dying out of grace? 
PoL But if a thousand pardons about their necks were tied, 
When come they to heaven if they never died? " 

Thus the two knaves jest about serious things. Then the Pedlar 
enters and sets forth his wares ; and after much humorous spar- 



138 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

ring, chiefly between the Pardoner and the Potecary, who make 
very rough fun of one another's pretensions, they settle down into 
the serious competition in lying. The comparatively quiet Palmer 
outwits his more boisterous companions, and tricks them into a 
confession of his superiority. "Gravely taking up the Pardoner's 
tale of a visit to hell, and of the devil's desire to get his kingdom 
kept clear of women, the Palmer wonders how women can be 
such shrews in the nether world, for in all his travels, in the course 
of which he has seen three hundred thousand women, he has 
never seen one woman out of patience. All cry out that this is a 
great lie. 

This kind of " merry interlude " was in high favour ; its heroes 
must have been felt to be an advance in point of comical interest 
upon the " vice " of the moralities. The fun, indeed, was of the 
same boisterous breadth in the moralities, and grew out of similar 
conceptions and situations ; but in the interludes the comical 
element was extracted and the heavy prosy element left behind. 
This process of extraction is seen in the interlude of ''Thersites," ^ 
a revel of gross exaggerated boasting and violent contrast between 
pretension and performance. Thersites is very much the same 
character as the Herod of the Mysteries and the Magnificence of 
the Moralities, only he is exhibited without any admixture of 
more serious elements ; he is a pure extravagance from beginning 
to end. The hero enters with a club on his neck, shouting — 

" Have in a ruffler, forth of the Greek land, 
Called Thersites, if ye will me know; 
Aback, give me room, in my way do not stand, 
For if ye do, I will soon lay you low." 

He speaks with contempt of the Greek chiefs, vowing that if he 
meets them he will make the dastards " run into a bag to hide 
them fro me, as from the devil of hell." After some comical mis- 
understanding, he obtains from Mulciber various pieces of armour, 
boasting louder and louder after each successive piece, adjuring 
all the great heroes of antiquity — Hercules, Samson, Cacus, Arthur, 
Launcelot, &c., &c. — to come and fight with him, declaring them 
to be puny things. " O good Lord," he cries, ^' how broad is my 
breast ! " 

" Behold you my hands, my legs, and my feet, 
Every part is strong, proportionable, and meet : 
Think you that I am not feared in held and street." 

Getting more and more intoxicated with the idea of his own might, 
he avows his intention of making a voyage to hell, to beat the 

1 Written apparently in 1537 ; not printed till 1561 ; reprinted for the Roxburghe 
Club in 1820. 



NICHOLAS UDALL. 1 39 

devil and his dame and bring away the souls. Then he will go to 
old purgatory, and will supersede the need of pardons to let out 
the sufferers. Finally, he will climb to heaven, fetch away Peter's 
keys, keep them himself, and let in a great rout, for " why should 
such a fisher keep good fellows out?" By-and-by his mother 
enters, and he expresses a vehement desire to fight with some lion 
or other wild beast, resisting his mother's tearful and kneeling 
entreaties that he will stay at home. Not Jupiter himself could 
restrain him. Presently a snail comes in, at which Thersites falls 
into a cold perspiration, in his alarm mistaking it for a sow or a 
cow ; he fights against it with his club, then casts away his club 
and takes to his sword, whereupon the snail draws his horns in, 
and he professes himself satisfied. Miles has entered while the 
combat was going on, and at the termination, when Thersites 
renews his bragging, offers to fight him. Thersites takes refuge 
at his mother's back, crying out that he is pursued by a thousand 
horsemen. This is the end of the plot ; what follows is an inco- 
herent appendage — a visit from Telemachus with a flattering in- 
troduction from Ulysses, asking Thersites to make his old mother 
charm the boy for a juvenile complaint of a not particularly 
delicate nature. 



V. — Nicholas Udall (1505-15 5 6) : Ralph Roister Doister — 
Gammer Giirton'' s Needle. 

Udall, sometime head-master at Eton, and celebrated for the 
severity of his discipline, is the founder of English comedy. 
Evidences remain of his liking for Terence and for Erasmus : in 
1533 he compiled and published certain translations from Terence 
under the title of ' Flowers from Latin speaking ; ' and he trans- 
lated Erasmus's Apophthegms in 1542, and his Paraphrase of the 
New Testament between 1542 and 1545. He early acquired, and 
maintained to the close of his life, a reputation for the writing of 
plays and pageants. He was employed along with Leland in 
1533 in composing verses for the city pageant exhibited before 
Anne Boleyn, when she rode through London to her coronation. 
And he was mentioned by Mary in a document of 1554 as one 
that had " heretofore showed and mindeth hereafter to show his 
diligence in setting forth of dialogues and interludes before us for 
our regal disport and recreation." 

The date of the composition of his comedy ' Ralph Roister 
Doister,' is not ascertained : ^ Mr Collier suggests that it was 

1 The only extant copy wants the title-page. We know that a printer had a 
Hcence to print the play in 1566. It is reprinted by the Shakespeare Society, 
and is included by Mr Arber in his series of English Reprints. 



140 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

written in Udall's youth. It is a great step in advance of morali- 
ties and interludes. The author names Plautus and Terence as 
his models, and terms the work an interlude or comedy, as if wish- 
ing to claim kindred with a higher order of composition. He had 
sufficient genius to borrow from the Romans a superior construc- 
tion of play without sacrificing any of his native humour to foreign 
affectations. Roister Doister rises above preceding dramatic rep- 
resentations in English in the formal excellence of being divided 
into Acts and Scenes, and, still more, in having a plot based upon 
lively misunderstandings — the proper and pecuhar plot of comedy. 

Its leading characters, too, are deliberate studies. The action of 
the play consists in the wooing of a widow, Dame Constance, by 
a boastful half-witted rich fellow, Ralph Roister Doister, who is 
set on and befooled by Matthew Merrygreek, an imitation of 
Terence's clever rogue and parasite. The play opens with the 
entrance of Merrygreek singing and cheerfully recounting his 
various shifts to gain an idle livelihood. Ralph, he says, is his 
chief banker and sheet-anchor, and one of the greatest louts in 
the kingdom. Presently Ralph enters, and from that moment till 
the end of the play is the victim of Merrygreek's tricks and ex- 
tortions. The rogue discovers that he is in love, and ready to run 
mad ; and after hearing of the lady's wealth, and moralising that 
marriage money usually shrinks, he works in the most amusing 
way on the hero's vanity. 

Ralph is a fine subject for ludicrous misadventures, and Merry- 
greek fools him to the top of his bent. His loutish character 
is kept up with many delightful touches of consistent humour. 
Acting always with the malicious Merrygreek at his elbow, he tries 
to follow Ovid's precept of gaining over the lady's servants : but 
not having the courage to approach Tibet Talkapace, a saucy 
coquettish handmaid, he makes up to old Madge Mumblecrust, 
the nurse, and while he is whispering into her ear, Merrygreek 
comes up with a following, pretends to take old Madge for the 
object of Ralph's devotion, and salutes her with absurd courtesy, 
much to Ralph's fury. Next Merrygreek acts as ambassador, 
brings back an insulting reply, and on Ralph's declaring himself 
unable to survive the shock, has a funeral service performed over 
him. Then Ralph employs a scrivener to write a moving letter, 
and Merrygreek in reading it to the lady, punctuates it, as Quince 
does the prologue in " Midsummer Night's Dream," in such a 
way as to reverse the meaning, send her away in a passion, and 
make Ralph vow to have the scrivener's life. Finally Merrygreek 
eggs him on to take the lady by force : she arms her maid-servants 
for the defence, and a comical battle ensues in which Ralph is 
ignominiously beaten. 

The play is saved from being a mere extravagance by the danger 



NICHOLAS UDALL. 141 

of serious consequences to Dame Constance from the suit of her 
foolish admirer. She is affianced to an honest merchant, Gawin 
Goodluck ; and he, on hearing mistaken reports which cause him 
to doubt herfidehty, is disposed to break off the engagement. How- 
ever, all comes right in the end : the faithful Constance is mar- 
ried to honest Gawin, and Ralph is pardoned his troublesome 
advances. 

It is impossible to say what may have been the single influence 
of * Roister Doister ' on English comedy : the probability is that 
its influence was inconsiderable. It was not printed till 1566, and 
by that time the more powerful influences of early Itahan comedy 
were beginning to operate. Besides, with all its cleverness and 
dehcate humour, the spirit of ' Roister Doister ' is essentially 
boyish : it was written to be acted by boys, and its extravagant 
incidents are of a kind to draw shouts of delight from boys. 
There are shrewd touches of worldly wisdom in it ; but, as a 
whole, it has not the robustness of comedy framed for the enjoy- 
ment of full-grown men and women. Our early comedy was 
largely coloured by the circumstance that much of it was written 
for boys. The interlude of ' Jack Juggler ' ^ is another example. 
This interlude was produced under the inspiration of Plautus, and 
it is superior in point of construction to earlier interludes, being, 
indeed, a farce with a plot perfectly rounded off. But it is too 
extravagant and unreal for our national comedy. It is entitled 
" a new interlude for children to play ; both witty and very pleas- 
ant." The personages are Master Boungrace, a gallant ; Dame 
Coy, a gentlewoman ; Jack Juggler, " the vice " ; Jenkin Care- 
away, a lackey ; and Alice Trip and Go, a maid. Poor Careaway, 
the lackey, has need for all his powers of banishing melancholy. 
His mistress is a pretty gingerly piece, as dainty and as nice as a 
halfpennyworth of silver spoons, but, like all other women, " a very 
cursed shrew by the blessed Trinity, and a very devil," and she 
takes special delight in getting him now and then by the pate as 
an afternoon exercise for her bodily health. His master is worse 
even than his mistress, once he is thoroughly angered. The maid 
Alison is a mincing, bridling, simpering, pranking young lady, 
quavering and warbling with every joint in her body when she 
goes out, chatting like a pye, speaking like a " parrot popinjay," 
" as fine as a small silken thread ; " and, what is of more con- 
sequence to the unfortunate lackey, a spiteful lying girl, never 
so happy as when she has a tale against him, and enjoying 
unbounded credit with her mistress. To crown all, he has a 
cunning and revengeful enemy in Jack Juggler. When he has 

1 Entered in the Stationers' Book, 1562-3 : reprinted for the Roxburghe Club 
in 1820. 



142 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

been sent out on a message, and has loitered, as he usually does, 
playing at bucklers, overturning the fruiterer's wife's basket and 
stealing her apples, losing his money at dice, and so forth. Jack 
Juggler puts on a suit of the same livery, takes possession of the 
house gate, and swears to the delinquent idler, that he is Jenkin 
Careaway, and boldly calls the real Jenkin a drunken knave for 
pretending to that name. Juggler beats the puzzled Jenkin till 
he denies his own identity, and bewilders him by telling him all 
that he has done that day, till the boy is disposed to think as well 
as to say that he is not himself. When left alone, he cries — 

" Good Lord of heaven, where did I myself leave? 
Or who did me of my name by the way bereave? 
For I am sure of this in my mind 
That I did in no place leave myself behind. 
If I had my name played away at dice, 
Or had sold myself to any man at a price, 
Or had made a fray and had lost it in fighting, 
Or it had been stolen from me sleeping. 
It had been a matter and I would have kept patience, 
But it spiteth my heart to have lost it by such open negligence." 

In his anxiety about his personality, he forgets all the lies he has 
invented to excuse his delays to his mistress and his master, and 
tells them what he has done ; so that Juggler has the satisfaction 
of seeing "the calf" soundly thrashed, Dame Coy shouting to her 
enraged husband — 

" Lay on and spare not for the love of Christ, 
Joll his head to a post, and favour your fist : 
Now, for my sake, sweetheart, spare and favour your hand, 
And lay him about the ribs with this wand." 

The interlude concludes with moralisings by Jenkin on the wrongs 
inflicted on innocent simplicity by strength and subtlety. 

The well-known play of ' Gammer Gurton's Needle ' (which is 
entitled a right pithy, pleasant, and merry comedy, and is divided 
into Acts and Scenes), is supposed to have been written about 
1560, and, before the discovery of 'Roister Bolster,' enjoyed the 
distinction of being considered our first regular comedy. It is 
said to have been written by " Mr S., Master of Arts " ; and its 
humour, which is certainly more robust than the humour of 
' Roister Bolster,' may have been considered suitable to the ex- 
panded tastes of Eton boys after they became undergraduates. It 
has, however, less of the character of a comedy than ' Roister 
Bolster ' ; it is essentially a farce, designed throughout for the 
free play of lungs and diaphragm, and the broadening and em- 
purpling of long and pale countenances. An irascible old gammer, 



THOMAS SACKVILLE. I43 

such as Noah's wife, has ahvays been a favourite character on the 
farcical stage : we see at the present day in Christmas Pantomimes 
how much can be got out of such a personage when enacted by a 
man, and in those days when greater freedom was allowed, we 
may imagine how laughter was made to hold both his sides. 
Gammer Gurton's temper is sorely tried. One day when she is 
mending her husband's breeches, Gib, the cat, seizes the oppor- 
tunity of indulging herself with a little milk. Gammer starts up 
and flings the breeches at the thief. On taking them up again, 
she cannot find the needle, and turns the house topsy-turvy in 
the search for it, interfering sadly with the comfort of goodman 
Hodge, who makes desperate suggestions as to possible places of 
concealment. A mischievous neighbour Diccon is tickled by the 
loss, and devises sundry practical jokes out of it. He tells the 
Gammer that Dame Chat has stolen it, and then goes to Dame 
Chat and tells her that Gammer Gurton accuses her of stealing 
her cock : in consequence of which malicious misinformation the 
two dames proceed to words, and from words to blows. Again, 
Diccon informs Dr Rat the curate that, if he goes to Dame Chat's, 
he will find her sewing with the very needle ; and then informs 
Dame Chat that that evening Hodge intends to make a return 
visit to her roost : the result of which plot is that the curate's 
skull is nearly fractured by the enraged dame with a door-bar. 
Ultimately the needle is discovered by accident imbedded in the 
part of Hodge's apparel on which he usually sits. 



VI. — Thomas Sackville (1536-7 — 1608) : The 
Mirro7'for Magistrates. 

In 1559, two years after the pubhcation of Tottel's Miscellany, 
was published a collection of poems more sombre in their hues 
than the gay songs and sonnets of Surrey and Wyat. Instead of 
Love, their burden was the mutability of Fortune as shown in the 
rise and fall of kings, rebels, and noble ministers of state ; and 
the gloomy record of ambition and disaster was called * The 
Mirror for Magistrates ' — a glass wherein rulers might see the 
dangers that wait on greatness. 

The work was projected in 1555, about the middle of the reign 
of Mary : and critics have not failed to remark how naturally the 
time called for such a mirror. It should, however, be borne in 
mind, that in the same year, 1555, appeared an edition of Chaucer ; 
and that Tottel's Songs and Sonnets first saw the light in print 
during the same " bloody " reign. I have already (p. 70) made 
some remarks on the dubiety of the connection between literature 
and politics. The origin of the ' Mirror for Magistrates ' is one 



144 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

of the facts that most strikingly illustrate how quietly literary 
operations proceed in the midst of political disquietude. In 1554 
or 1555, Wayland the printer was producing an edition of Lyd- 
gate's translation of Boccaccio's ' Fall of Princes ' (in rivalry to an 
edition of Tottel), and was advised by several of his patrons, 
" both honourable and worshipful," " to have the story continued 
from whereas Bochas left unto this present time, chiefly of such as 
Fortune had dallied with here in this island, which might be a 
mirror to all men as well nobles as others." Wayland applied to 
one William Baldwin — a graduate of Oxford, who in 1549 described 
himself as " servant with Edward Whitchurch " the printer,^ and 
who was prepared to write plays and philosophical treatises as 
well as poems ; but Baldwin would not undertake the task with- 
out assistance. Accordingly, learned men, to the number of seven, 
were invited to a consultation, to which Baldwin resorted with 
Lydgate's translation under his arm ; and there and then they 
agreed to supplement Boccaccio (who had left off with the capture 
of the King of France at Poictiers) by calling up the shades of 
unfortunate English kings and ministers, from the time of Richard 
II., and making them bewail " their grievous chances, heavy 
destinies, and woful misfortunes." It was agreed that Baldwin 
should "usurp Bochas* room," the ghostly figures being supposed 
to address themselves to him, and that each of the company 
should take upon him some unfortunate's lament. George Fer- 
rers — a lawyer who maintained himself in court favour under 
Henry, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth, and who was noted as a 
director of dramatic pageants — undertook the first of the tragic 
series, the fall of Chief-Justice Tresilian, remarking on the abun- 
dant material in our earlier history, but deferring to the printer's 
wish to have merely a continuation of Boccaccio as an experi- 
mental speculation. This was the origin of the ' Mirror for 
Magistrates.' An enterprising printer was eager for trade, ready 
to print anything, whether grave or gay, that was ready to sell ; 
and when he had in hand an edition of Lydgate's translation of 
the ' Fall of Princes,' one of his customers suggested a continua- 
tion of the work to modern times. This is what it comes to when 
we scrutinise the phantom of a gloomy book rising out of a gloomy 
reign. It rises side by side with another bookseller's speculation 
of gayer aspect, both fitted to gratify interests that never die out 
among the reading portion of any community. The imagination 
can never live upon comedy alone ; some of us are more mirthful 
than others, and more mirthful at some times than at other times, 
but nearly all of us desire to alternate the gay with the grave. 
As the ' Mirror ' itself was designed to show, no period in our 

1 Printers now began to be, to some extent, the patrons of literary men ; who 
still, however, depended more upon the munificence of noble patrons. 



THOMAS SACKVILLE. I45 

annals had been exempt from the caprices of Fortune ; had such a 
reign as Mary's been enough to extinguish love and mirth among 
her subjects, all our poetry anterior to her reign would have been 
overhung by the gloom of Erebus. 

The first edition of the ' Mirror,' published as we have said in 
1559,^ contained nineteen legends from the reigns of Richard IL, 
Henry IV., Henry V., Henry VI., and Edward IV. Twelve of 
these are attributed to Baldwin, three to Ferrers : Baldwin was 
also general editor, and wove the stories together by a prose 
narrative of the remarks made when they were first read in the 
conclave of authors. In 1563 appeared a second edition, with 
eight more legends of later date. In 1574, John Higgins went 
back to the fabulous beginnings of our history, and wrote sixteen 
legends of unfortunate British princes between " the coming of 
Brute and the incarnation of our Saviour." In 1578, Thomas 
Blennerhasset wrote twelve legends of the times between Caesar 
and the Conquest. Various scattered additions were made during 
the reign of Elizabeth ; but the next great event in the bibli- 
ography of the work was the collection of the whole by Richard 
Niccols in 16 10. Niccols took great liberties with the text, and 
omitted all the intermediate V envoys of Higgins and conversations 
of Baldwin and Blennerhasset. The standard modern edition 
is Halsewood's, 1815. 

Thomas Sackville, created Baron Buckhurst in 1567 and 
Earl of Dorset in 1603, has no right to be called the "primary 
inventor " of the ' Mirror for Magistrates,' seeing that his In- 
duction and his Legend of the Duke of Buckingham were not 
printed till the second edition in 1563; but his name may still 
be associated with the work as its most distinguished contributor. 
He infused into it a new and higher spirit. His coadjutors would 
have been content to drone on with scattered legends on the old 
plan, but Sackville aspired to emulate Dante with a connected 
epic. His language, also, as well as his conception, is fresh and 
powerful : his singing-robes are new and rich, and throw a double 
dinginess on the verses of his associates, which are covered with 
mean and incongruous patches. 

Sackville's plan is this. He walks out at nightfall towards the 
close of autumn, when the declining light and the approaching 
winter remind him sharply of the changes of Fortune. In the 
midst of his gloomy meditations, there suddenly appears before 
him a hideous figure in the extremity of grief and despair. This 
figure is Sorrow, who discourses to him of the frailty of human 
greatness, and conveys him through a gloomy entrance to the 
abode of departed spirits, proposing to show him the ghosts of 
unfortunate peers and princes, and to make them relate their 

1 The publication was delayed by Mary's Chancellor. 



146 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

history. The first of these unfortunates is the Duke of Bucking- 
ham, who was decapitated by Richard III. Sackville's purpose 
was to continue the hst of ill-starred British warriors and states- 
men backwards to the Conquest, working into his plan the legends 
already versified by Ferrers and Baldwin. Very naturally and 
properly he deposed Baldwin from the place of Boccaccio, and 
made the ghost of Buckingham address himself : — 

" And, Sackville, sith in purpose now thou hast 
The woful fall of princes to descrive, 
Whom Fortune hath uplift, and 'gain down cast, 
To show thereby the unsurety in this life," &c. 

Sackville never went beyond his one legend, and the other con- 
tributors do not seem to have been prepared to merge themselves 
in his plan, so that this complaint of Buckingham, with the 
Induction prefixed, was simply printed among the rest in the 
original chronological order.^ 

Sackville's position in literature is unique. He projected and 
began our first grand epic, and wrote our first tragic drama,^ at 
once taking a permanent rank in the history of our poetry, and 
placing himself at the head of contemporary English poets, before 
he had completed his twenty-seventh year : then, so far as is 
known, he -abandoned the Muses for good. After a short period 
of dissipation and reckless profusion, he reformed, entered public 
life, was employed on diplomatic service by Elizabeth, succeeded 
Burleigh as Lord High Treasurer, and continued to be the greatest 
subject of the realm during the first five years of the reign of 
James ; but though he lived to the age of seventy-one, he is not 
known to have written one line after his contribution to the ' Mir- 
ror for Magistrates.' 

The ' Mirror for Magistrates,' being designed as a continuation 
of Lydgate's translation, was written chiefly in the same seven-line 
stanza. It is probably in consequence of his study of Lydgate 
that Sackville, while writing in this stanza, uses a greater number 
of archaic words than in ' Gorboduc,' which is written in blank 
verse. His turns of expression generally afford abundant traces of 

1 When Higgins subsequently went back to Brute the Trojan, he aspired to be 
the leading figure, and copied Sackville's Induction. He failed, however, to 
digest the unmanageable mass of legends, so that the 'Mirror for Magistrates' 
remained to the last a crude abortion of the grand epic. The authors were 
certainly not a " mirror for magistrates " in their unsubordinated action and 
craving for personal pre-eminence. 

'^ ' The Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex,' first acted in the Christmas Revels 
of the Inner Temple, afterwards before Elizabeth at Whitehall, Jan. 18, 1561. 
It was published by the authors in 1570, having previously appeared in a 
surreptitious edition. In the edition of 1590 the title was altered to ' Gorboduc' 
Thomas Norton was conjoined in the authorship, but his share cannot be traced, 
and is believed to be small. 



THOMAS SACKVILLE. I47 

the influence of Wyat and Surrey : echoes of Wyat's Penitential 
Psalms are especially frequent. As he wrote in youth, and prob- 
ably also in haste, his debts to predecessors are particularly easy 
to follow ; and it is obvious that he was a careful student of 
Dante and Virgil, as well as of our native poets. From Dante, 
undoubtedly, he received his main inspiration. 

The personified abstractions that Sackville met in the abode of 
fallen princes are drawn with great power and harmony of attri- 
butes. In the opening of his Induction, as we have said, he 
describes himself as meeting the hideous figure of Sorrow at 
nightfall in a dreary evening, when the bare trees and blustering 
winds reminded him of P'ortune's changes ; and he observes the 
same propriety in describing the tenants of the infernal gulf with 
their behaviour and various circumstances. Sackville's personifi- 
cations of Sorrow, Remorse, Dread, Revenge, Misery, Care, Sleep, 
Old Age, Malady, Famine, Death, War, were conceived with a 
sustained energy and pregnant significance then unparalleled in 
our literature. They were not eclipsed by the efforts of Spenser 
in the same vein ; ^ and they held their ground till the freshness 
of such creations had faded. The following is his picture of 
Misery : — 

" His face was lean and somedeal pined away, 
And eke his hands consumed to the bone; 
But what his body was I cannot say, 
For on his carcase raiment had he none, 
Save clouts and patches pieced one by one; 
With staff in hand and scrip on shoulders cast. 
His chief defence against the winter's blast. 

His food for most was wild fruits of the tree, 
Unless sometimes some crumbs fell to his share; 
Which in his wallet long, God wot, kept he, 
As on the which full daintily would he fare : 
His drink the running stream, his cup the bare 
Of the palm closed; his bed the hard cold ground. 
To this poor life was Misery ybound." 

This picture is all the more remarkable when we consider the 
rank of the poet. And when we consider his youth, we are also 
surprised at his vivid picture of hoary, trembling Old Age, be- 
moaning with broken and hollow plaint his forepast youth, but 
still clinging to life, and praying that he be not yet sent down to 
the grave, to lie for ever in darkness : — 

" Crook-backed he was, tooth-shaken, and blear-eyed, 
Went on three feet, and sometimes crept on four, 
"With old lame bones that rattled by his side, 
His scalp all pill'd, and he with eld forlore : 

1 They are all quoted in England's Parnassus, 1600. 



148 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

His wither'd fist still knocking at death's door; 
Fumbling and drivelling as he draws his breath 
For brief, the shape and messenger of death." 

The grisly shape of Famine is described as tearing her own 
flesh for hunger, clutching at everything that comes near her, and 
gnashing on her own bones. Her destruction by Death is a fearful 
picture of fiendish triumph : — 

" On her while we thus firmly fixed our eyes, 
That bled for ruth of such a dreary sight, 
Lo ! suddenly she shrieked in so huge wise, 
As made hell-gates to shiver with the might : 
Wherewith a dart we saw how it did light 
Right on her breast, and therewithal pale Death 
Enthrilling it to reave her of her breath." 

Campbell has compared the Induction to " a landscape on which 
the sun never shines." The gloom is farther intensified by some 
exquisite hints of what the landscape was before '' hawthorn had 
lost his motely livery," and before " the naked twigs were shivering 
all for cold." We pass through the horrors of the nether world 
with a feeling that it is winter also in the upper world : and we 
shudder still more when we think on the sweet season that winter 
has supplanted. In the middle of the " Complaint of Bucking- 
ham " there is another powerful effect of contrast. Buckingham 
swoons at the recollection of a dependent's treachery ; and while 
he lies between death and life, the poet relieves the horrors of the 
scene by a description of midnight peace : — 

*' Midnight was come, and every vital thing 
With sweet sound sleep their weary limbs did rest; 
The beasts were still, the little birds that sing 
Now sweetly slept beside their mothers' breast : 
The old and all were shrouded in their nest. 
The waters calm, the cruel seas did cease, 
The woods, the fields, and all things held their peace. 

The golden stars were whirl'd amid their race. 
And on the earth did laugh with twinkling light. 
When each thing, nestled in his resting-place, 
Forgat day's pain with pleasure of the night : 
The hare had not the greedy hounds in sight, 
The fearful deer of death stood not in doubt. 
The partridge dreamt not of the falcon's foot. 

The ugly bear now minded not the stake, 
Nor how the cruel mastives do him tear; 
The stag lay still unroused from the brake, 
The foamy boar feared not the hunter's spear. 
All thing was still in desert, bush, and brear. 
With quiet heart now from their travails ceast, 
Soundly they slept in midst of all their rest." 



THOMAS SACKVILLE. 



149 



The tragedy of " Gorbodiic " was written by one profoundly 
interested in grave problems of state, and was designed for an 
audience whose interests were also deeply political. Gorboduc, a 
fabulous King of Britain, B.C. 500, takes counsel about dividing 
his realm in his lifetime between his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex, 
and makes the division against the advice of his wisest counsel- 
lors. Ferrex and Porrex are jealous of each other : this jealousy 
is fanned by mischievous flatterers : Porrex, the younger, suddenly 
issues from his own dominions with an invading army and puts 
his brother to death : in revenge, he is assassinated by their 
mother Videna : finally, Videna and Gorboduc are murdered by 
the populace to avenge the assassination of Porrex, and the race 
of Brutus being thus extinguished, the kingdom is left a prey to 
contending factions. The story gives ample scope for the display 
of political wisdom ; and the various opportunities are used with 
a fulness that no doubt sustained the interest of Elizabeth and her 
courtiers, though it would be dull enough to the play-goers of our 
time. But the story contains also tragic materials of universal 
interest. The unnatural jealousy of Ferrex and Porrex, inflamed 
by devilish suggestions to the horror of fratricide ; the love of 
Videna for her eldest son, begetting the fierce thirst for a revenge 
so monstrous ; the blind fury of the populace lighting upon inno- 
cent old Gorboduc, whose only crime was infatuated parental 
fondness ; and the final reduction of a well-ordered prosperous 
kingdom to a confused and embroiled anarchy, form no ordinary 
complication of human passions and human weakness leading to 
tragic consequences. 

Although, howev^er, Sackville is the author of the first extant 
tragedy in the English language, and though it deserves all Pope's 
encomium for its propriety of sentiments, unaffected perspicuity, 
easy flow of numbers, " chastity, correctness, and gravity," he is 
not to be called the " founder of English tragedy." That title is 
reserved for Marlowe. The reason for the seeming inconsistency 
is, that Sackville adhered to classic models, and did not adapt 
himself to the changed mode of representation. There is a radi- 
cal difference between "Gorboduc" and the form of tragedy that 
established itself on the English stage. The actors of Greek and 
Roman tragedy, to suit their large public theatres, were raised on 
thick-soled buskins, and stuffed out to more than human bulk. 
Thus stiffened, they could not represent animated action, and 
were forced to suppose such action to take place behind the 
scenes, and to communicate the state of affairs to the audience, 
in narrative, soliloquy, and dialogue. English actors, on the other 
hand, were hampered by no bodily encumbrance, and were free 
to engage in battle, murder, and violent struggle : and thus it was 
possible for English dramatists to bring the action on the stage. 



150 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

Apart, therefore, from the debated question of good or bad taste in 
filling the stage with violent action, it is clear that this was not 
possible for the classical dramatist, whereas it was possible for the 
English dramatist. Now Sackville, in our first English tragedy, 
did not fully avail himself of the possibilities of the modern stage. 
The war be ween Porrex and Ferrex, the murder of Porrex by 
Videna, the storming of the palace and the massacre of old 
Gorboduc by the rabble, were narrated, not represented, as they 
would have been by the later Elizabethan actors. It is, however, 
worthy of notice, that he did to some extent avail himself of the 
modern possibilities in the " dumb show " before the Acts. " The 
order and signification of the dumb show before the Fifth Act," 
is set down as follows : " First the drums and flutes began to 
sound, during which there came forth upon the stage a company 
of harquebushers and of armed men, all in order of battle. 
These after their pieces discharged, and that the armed men had 
three times marched about the stage, departed, and then the 
drums and flutes did cease. Hereby was signified tumults, rebel- 
lions, arms, and civil wars to follow, &c." There we have a certain 
anticipation of the " excursions " and hand-to-hand fighting after- 
wards incorporated with the play. Although, therefore, we may 
not call Sackville the " founder," we may very well call him the 
" pioneer," of English tragedy, as well as of our grand epic. 



VII. — Richard Edwards (15 23-1566) : Damon and Pythias — 
Pai'adise of Dainty Devices. 

About the time of the first representation of " Gorboduc," was 
presented also for the entertainment of her Majesty the comedy 
of " Damon and Pythias," which is in some respects of a higher 
order than the imitations of Plautus and Terence, composed for 
the boys of Eton or the undergraduates of the Universities. The 
author was Richard Edwards, Master of the Children of the 
Chapel Royal, a poet and a musician, formerly a student of Christ 
Church, Oxford : and he would seem to have kept in mind in 
whose presence his play was to be acted. It is to be presumed, 
from bloodthirsty Mary's preference for Heywood and Udall, that 
she enjoyed a hearty laugh for its own sake ; but her successor, if 
we may judge from her warm commendations of " Damon and 
Pythias," though not averse to comic scenes of a broad character, 
desired to encourage a more decorous order of play with some 
pretence to gravity, wisdom, and refined sentiment — an easy, pleas- 
ant, witty play, enforcing a lofty sentiment and a lesson of state, such 
as she and her statesmen might listen to with pleasure, and without 
incurring the charge of frivolity. At any rate this was the kind of 



RICHARD EDWARDS. I5I 

play that Edwards famished and that her Majesty commended. 
It is a praise of true friendship and an exposure of false friendship, 
ending with the moral that — 

" The strongest guard that kings can have 
Are constant friends their state to save " — 

and a prayer that God grant such friends to Queen Elizabeth. 
Edwards goes to classical story for a pair of noble friends, Damon 
and Pythias, and exhibits them at the Court of the tyrant Dionysius 
the younger in glaring contrast to two false friends, two men 
who pretend friendship from interested motives — Aristippus, the 
worldly-wise philosopher, a type of an urbane courtier, and Cariso- 
phus, a vile type of spy and informer. The devotion of the two 
faithful friends is fiercely tried and nobly maintained, while the 
other partnership is dissolved the moment it ceases to be useful to 
one of the parties. A good deal of amusing action and witty dia- 
logue is got out of the relations of Aristippus and Carisophus to 
the Court and to each other : and a passage of more boisterous 
entertainment is rather forcibly provided by introducing Grim, a 
collier of Croydon, as purveyor of coals to Dionysius. 

Edwards starts in his prologue with very sound principles for the 
composition of comedy : — 

" In Comedies the greatest skill is this, rightly to touch 
All things to the quick, and eke to frame each person so, 
That by his common talk you may his nature rightly know : 
A Roister ought not to preach, that were too strange to hear, 
But as from virtue he doth swerve, so ought his words appear : 
The old man is sober, the young man rash, the Lover triumphing in joys, 
The Matron grave, the Harlot wild and full of wanton toys. 
Which as in one course all they no wise do agree : 
So correspondent to their kind their speeches ought to be." 

And it must be owned that he fulfils these conditions with no 
small success. He is not particular to realise the political or relig- 
ious talk that may be supposed to have taken place at the Court 
of Syracuse, but he makes the most of the common hints of the 
character of Dionysius, and develops Aristippus with considerable 
spirit from the famous line of Horace — 

" Omnis Aristippum decuit color et status et res." 

One very striking passage in the play is that where Damon 
quotes the description of Ulysses in Horace's version of the open- 
ing lines of the Odyssey as the description of " a perfect wise 
man" — qui mores homiiium imdtoru7?i vidit et urbes — one who 
had seen cities and the manners of many different men. This 
ideal is significant of the coming excellence of English drama ; 



152 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

and there are not wanting other evidences that observation of 
character was then quite a mania among Uterary men. 

Edwards was the author also of a play on " Palamon and 
Arcite," which has not been preserved. We have, however, 
another monument of his poetical taste and talent in the ' Para- 
dise of Dainty Devices,' a miscellany of amatory and moral pieces, 
similar to Tottel's Miscellany. It was not published till 1576, ten 
years after the death of its editor. It ran through several editions 
before the end of the century. This paradise was described by a 
critic of the period as " a packet of bald rhymes " ; and the de- 
scription could not easily be improved. It is lugubrious and barren 
of genius to a degree. All the contributors write in the same dole- 
ful strain. As a whole, it gives an impression of dismal monotony ; 
and when we put together the productions of the several writers, 
we find them one and all in doleful dumps. Edwards laments the 
prevalence of flattery, the subtle sleights practised at Court, the 
slow fulfilment of promises, the general want of truth, the rapid 
decay of worldly beauties, the delay of his desires, the cruel 
power of Fortune. He denounces the frauds that beguile simple 
honesty : — 

" I see the serpent vile, that luiks under the green, 
How subtilly he shrouds Himself that he may not be seen : 
And yet his foster'd bane his leering looks bewray. 
Wo worth the wily heads that seeks the simple man's decay ! 

Wo worth the feigning looks on favour that do wait ! 

Wo worth the feigned friendly heart that harbours deep deceit! 

Wo worth the viper's brood ! O thrice wo -worth I say 

All worldly wily heads that seeks the simple man's decay ! " 

His coadjutors are equally miserable and indignant against wrong- 
doing. W, Hunnis is eloquent in lover's melancholy : he repents 
the folly of misplaced affection and misspent youth : he compares 
himself to a dove on a leafless branch weeping and wailing and 
tearing its breast : finding no joy ^n life he desires death. He 
is no less unhappy in his notions of friendship. Thomas, Lord 
Vaux, several of whose pieces had appeared in Tottel's Miscellany, 
is also a sorrowful singer : and Jasper Heywood, Francis Kinwel- 
marsh. Sands, F. M., and Richard Hill, are all laid under contribu- 
tion for poems of a grave or lugubrious cast. The liveliest of the 
company is Edward, Earl of Oxford. He also, indeed, bewails 
the loss of his good name, and cries for help to gods, saints, sprites, 
powers, and howling hounds of hell; writes of rejected loves and 
unattained desires, of trickling tears and irremediable pensiveness. 
But his wounds are obviously shallow. The sprightly verses on a 
reply given by Desire have more of his heart in them ; — 



GEORGE GASCOIGNE. I 53 

" The lively lark did stretch her wing 
The messenger of morning bright : 
And with her cheerful voice did sing 
The day's approach, discharging night, 
When that Aurora blushing red 
Descried the guilt of Thetis' bed. 
Laradon tan tan, Tedriton teight. 

I went abroad to take the air, 
And in the meads I met a knight. 
Clad in carnation colour fair. 
I did salute the youthful wight; 
Of him his name 1 did inquire; 
He sighed and said, I am Desire, 
Laradon tan tan, Tedriton teight. 

Desire I did desire to stay, 
Awhile with him I craved talk : 
The courteous wight said me no nay, 
But hand in hand with me did walk. 
Then in desire I asked again 
What thing did please and what did pain. 
Laradon tan tan. 

He smiled and thus he answered me 
Desire can have no greater pain, 
Than for to see another man 
The thing desired to obtain. 
No joy no greater too than this 
Than to enjoy what others miss. 
Laradon tan tan.'' 



VIII. — George Gascoigne (15 25-15 77). 

Within the first ten years of Elizabeth's reign another novelty 
was added to the drama. In 1566, George Gascoigne translated 
from Ariosto, for representation at Gray's Inn, the prose comedy 
Gli-Siippositi. This, acted under the title of "The Supposes," is 
the first comedy written in English prose, and in plot, situation, 
and character, it approaches nearer than " Damon and Pythias " 
to the estabhshed type of Enghsh comedy. One great tribute 
to its excellence is the use made of its plot and its situations by 
Shakespeare : the underplot in the " Taming of the Shrew " is 
an adaptation of the plot of " The Supposes," and a great many of 
the situations or relations between the various characters might be 
paralleled from Shakespeare's comedies. 

George Gascoigne, " soldier and poet " as he loved to describe 
himself, was the most versatile writer belonging to the first half 
of Elizabeth's reign ; and contrived to anticipate more than one 
of the forms of composition in which the later Elizabethans 
achieved their fame. Few writers can claim a more varied list of 



154 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

literary exploits. Besides his prose comedy, he translated from 
the Italian of Bandello the prose tale of "Jeronimi," perhaps the 
first novel printed in English : wrote the mock-heroic poem of 
" Dan Bartholomew," our first attempt to rival the mock-heroic 
poetry of the Italians : wrote three acts of '' Jocasta," the first 
adaptation of a Greek tragedy performed on the English stage : 
prepared masques for Queen Elizabeth : composed in prose a dull 
" tragical comedy " " The Glass of Government " : and wrote the 
" Steel Glass," the first extensive English satire. 

His personal history is not without interest. It affords a touch- 
ing example of middle-age rendered miserable by thoughtless 
youth. When he went up from Cambridge to the Inns of Court, a 
vigorous, enthusiastic young fellow, " well-born, tenderly fostered, 
and dehcately accompanied," he was ready to join friends and 
companions in any excitement, animal or intellectual. One of 
his earhest adventures in London was a temporary imprisonment 
during the year 1548, on a charge of dicing and other disrepu- 
table practices. Entering into the fashion of the time, he wrote 
love-verses whose coarse boisterous humour was warmly resented 
by the graver sort when first they appeared in print. Aspiring 
to political distinction, he sat as a burgess for Bedford during 
the reign of Mary. When play-writing became the rage, he at 
once figured in the front of play-wrights. Before this, having 
impaired his estate by his extravagance, and being disinherited 
as a prodigal son, he had sought to retrieve his fortunes by marry- 
ing a rich widow ; but either the money was tied up from him 
for behoof of the lady's children by her former husband, or he 
got it into his hands and ran through it before 1572, for at that 
date he endeavoured to gain admission into Parliament as bur- 
gess for Midhurst, and was defeated by formal objections, which 
represented him as being a slanderous rhymer, a notorious ruffian, 
an atheist, a manslaughterer, and an extensive debtor lurking 
about in fear of apprehension, and seeking admission to Parlia- 
ment that he might be able to defy his creditors. It may have 
been this last ignoble motive, if not the motive of retrieving his 
name by brave achievements, that induced him to cross over to 
Holland and seek a commission under the Prince of Orange. 
After his return from Holland in 1573, he made shift to live 
by his pen. He was now well on to fifty, harassed by debt, met 
on all sides with cold looks, bitterly regretful of the mad follies 
of his youth. During his absence, some of his questionable poesies 
had been printed, and were read with indignation by the guardians 
of public morality. Soon after his return, in 1575, he issued an 
edition of his works under the title of ' Flowers, Herbs, and 
Weeds.' In a prefatory epistle to " reverend divines," he apolo- 
gises humbly but with some bitterness for the faults of his youth ; 



GEORGE GASCOIGNE. I 55 

and out of deference to them reprints his youthful effusions in 
a purified form, and with the self-accusing title of "weeds." 
There is a bitterness in all his later compositions. He often 
writes as if experience had taught him that he must not speak 
evil of dignitaries, while he chafed against the enforced restraint ; 
in the tone of his protestations of respect, he betrayed a some- 
what savage sense of the injustice done him by merciless remem- 
brance of his misspent youth. Poor man : he might have written 
well if the world had gone pleasantly with him, but he was dis- 
concerted and embittered by coldness and suspicion. Yet he 
was not wholly without countenance and patronage. Arthur 
Lord Grey of Wilton was a steady friend to him, and might have 
secured him preferment had he not himself fallen into disgrace. 
He was asked by the Earl of Leicester to help in the pageants for 
the entertainment of Elizabeth in the famous reception at Kenil- 
worth. Still his poems have a consistent tinge of gloom. In the 
epistle dedicatory to his "Steel Glass" (1576), he records how 
he was " derided, suspected, accused, and condemned ; yea, more 
than that, vigorously rejected when he proffered amends for his 
harm." "The Drum of Doomsday," "The View of Worldly 
Vanities," "The Shame of Sin," "The Needle's Eye," "Remedies 
against the Bitterness of Death," "A Dehcate Diet for Dainty- 
mouthed Drunkards," " The Grief of Joy," " The Griefs or Dis- 
commodities of Lusty Youth," "The Vanities of Beauty," "The 
Faults of Force and Strength," "The Vanities of Activities," are 
the significantly cheerless titles and sub-titles of his last produc- 
tions. He died at Stamford towards the end of 1577. 

Not that Gascoigne was a man of first-rate genius. He never 
would have been anything higher than a versatile master of verse. 
But his energy was prodigious ; and the career of such energy is 
always an interesting spectacle. 

Some of the precepts in his "Notes of Instruction"^ in verse- 
making may be put in evidence regarding his qualifications as a 
poet. The most suggestive is his advice to young poets in search 
of rhyme — " When you have set down your first verse, take the 
last word thereof, and count over all the words of the self-same 
sound by order of the alphabet." Another sound practical ad- 
vice is to use as few polysyllables as possible ; first, because the 
most ancient English words are of one syllable, but also because 
" words of one syllable will more easily fall to be short or long as 
occasion requireth." Characteristic of his own clearness and 
vigour is his advice to study perspicuity, to abstain from Latin 
inversions, to be sparing of poetical hcences, and to avoid com- 
monplaces. It is remarkable, also, that he enunciates a prin- 

1 Reprinted by Mr Arber along with the "Steel Glass" and the " Complaint of 
Philomene," 



156 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

ciple which is sometimes spoken of as being of later growth — 
" Remember to place every word in his natural emphasis or sound 
— that is to say, in such wise and with such length or shortness, 
elevation or depression of syllables, as it is commonly pronounced 
and used." He also lays down a strict rule of caesura. 

The *'Jocasta," an adaptation from the " Phcenissae " of Eurip- 
ides, contains some powerful situations, but they are lost in the 
mass of tedious narrative dialogue. The blank verse has every 
appearance of having been patched up hurriedly. One of the best 
passages is the interchange of defence between Etiocles and Poly- 
nices in the presence of their mother : it would have been difficult 
to destroy the tragic force of such a situation. 

The tale of Ferdinando Jeronimi and Leonora de Valasco is a 
voluptuous story of warm but fickle love, won easily and lost 
through exacting causeless jealousy. It was probably one item 
in the education of that generation of poets in the arts and ways 
of love : its main lesson, apart from its exquisite little windings 
and turnings, being that where a woman yields her whole heart 
she is implacably offended when she discovers that she is not 
trusted. In style the tale is the parent of the tales of Lyly and 
Greene. Its ^' euphuism " is not so methodical as euphuism 
strictly so called — the developed mannerism of Lyly : but one 
might quote from Gascoigne passages that contain all the elements 
of that mannerism. Gascoigne, however, was too robust a nature 
to develop this sort of figurative language into a system. After 
a euphuistic passage, he begins a new paragraph by saying — ''to 
speak English." 

His love-verses are not the verses of a sentimental inamorato, 
or impassioned lover. He woos more like Diomede than like 
Troilus, praising his lady's beauty with humorous ardour, and 
bidding her " farewell with a mischief " when she proves incon- 
stant. Grave and reverend divines had some reason to complain 
of a poet who published three sonnets written upon the occasion 
of presenting his mistress with a copy of the "Golden Ass" of 
Apuleius. His more serious lyrics have an impetuous movement 
and rough fire in them that make us think of poor George as an 
imperfect Byron, — resembling Byron as he did not a little in his 
life, and complaining of the same identification of himself with 
his heroes. 

There is abundance of comic vigour and mad rollicking humour 
in " Dan Bartholomew of Bath." It may be made another point 
of comparison with Byron ; but its general strain bears more re- 
semblance to Lockhart's " Mad Banker of Amsterdam." The 
hero's courtship and deceptive triumph, his discomfiture and dolo- 
rous laments, his Last Will and Testament, his Subscription and 
Seal, his Farewell, and "The Reporter's " conclusion in the style 



GEORGE GASCOIGNE. I 5/ 

of the ' Mirror for Magistrates,' are executed with great spirit. 
The account of his falHng in love will give an idea of the 
style : — 

" For though he had in all his learned lore 
Both read good rules to bridle fantasy, 
And all good authors taught him evermore 
To love the mean and leave extremity; 
Yet Kind hath left him such a quality, 
That at the last he quite forgot liis books, 
And fastened fancy with the fairest looks. 

For proof: when green youth leapt out of his eye, 

And left him now a man of middle age, 

His hap was yet with wandering looks to spy 

A fair young imp of proper personage, 

Eke born (as he) of honest parentage: 

And truth to tell, my skill it cannot serve 

To praise her beauty as it did deserve. 

First for her head : the hairs were not of gold. 
But of some other metal far more fine. 
Whereof each crinet seemed, to behold. 
Like glistering wires against the sun that shine; 
And therewithal the blazing of her eyne 
Was like the beams of Titan, truth to tell, 
Which glads us all that in this world do dwell. 

Upon her cheeks the lily and the rose 
Did intermeet with equal change of hue, 
And in her gifts no lack I can suppose 
But that at last (alas) she was untrue : 
Which flinging fault, because it is not new 
Nor seldom seen in kits of Cressid's kind, 
I marvel not, nor bear it much in mind. 

That mouth of hers which seemed to flow with mell 

In speech, in voice, in tender touch, in taste: 

That dimpled chin wherein delight did dwell, 

That ruddy lip wherein was pleasure placed; 

Those well-shaped hands, fine arms, and slender waist, 

With all the gifts which gave her any grace, 

Were smiling baits which caught fond fools apace." 

" The Glass of Government " belongs to the broken-down and 
disheartened period of his life. It was pubhshed in 1575. He 
calls it a tragical comedy to illustrate the rewards and punish- 
ments of virtues and vices, consecrates the tide-page with a quo- 
tation from Scripture, and fills a preliminary fly-leaf with pious, 
loyal, patriotic, and moral saws. The prologue forbids all ex- 
pectations of merry jest and vain delight, referring wanton play- 
goers to interludes and Italian toys, and announcing that the 
comedy is not a comedy in Terence's sense, but a mirror to lords 



158 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

and citizens, and a beacon to rash youth. The argument is the 
history of four young men, two of quick capacity, who become 
dissipated, and end their careers in shame — two of dull under- 
standing, but steady industry, who are preferred to honourable 
positions. The play is saturated with good advice, the education 
of the young men affording opportunities for commonplace counsel 
and the exposition of learned precepts by exemplary parents and 
teachers, possessing the profoundest sense of their responsibilities. 
Copious citations are made from Scripture, and from Greek and 
Roman moralists and poets. It is virtually a moral-play, with in- 
dividual names given to the abstractions, and the parasite of Latin 
comedy in place of the Vice of the Moralities. 

"The Steel Glass" shows poor Gascoigne sunk deep in the 
slough of despondency and bitterness. And in one of his smaller 
poems it is sad to find him thus looking back to the strength of 
his youth, and reflecting that strength is after all a dangerous 
thing, which may in the end prove to be a less bountiful gift of 
nature than weakness : — 

" I have been strong (I thank my God therefore) 
And did therein rejoice as most men did : 
I leapt, I ran, I toiled and travailed sore, 
My might and main did covet to be kid. ^ 
But lo : behold : my merry days amid, 
One heady deed my haughty heart did break, 
And since (full oft) I wished I had been v^'eak. 
The weakling he sits buzzing at his book^ 
Or keeps full close, and loves to live in quiet : 
For lack of force he warily doth look 
In every dish which may disturb his diet. 
He neither fights nor runneth after riot. 
But stays his steps by mean and measure too, 
And longer lives than many strong men do." 



IX. — Thomas Churchyard (15 20-1 604). 

Much tamer in every way than Gascoigne was this other soldier 
and poet, yet he is an interesting man, if for no other reason than 
that he saw the wonderful growth of the Elizabethan literature 
from its beginnings to its maturity. He lived for some two years 
in the service of the Earl of Surrey, contributed to Tottel's Mis- 
cellany and to the ' Mirror for Magistrates,' and survived to issue 
several books contemporaneously with the plays of Shakespeare. 
He began hfe as a gay gallant or "royster" at the Court of 
Henry VIIL, and he saw the accession of James I. Though 
his poetry is of small account, his life was eventful and interest- 

1 Known. 



TRANSLATORS OF SENECA AND OVID. 1 59 

ing. In the war with Scotland under Edward VI. he was taken 
prisoner ; being ransomed, he returned to Court, found himself 
forgotten and neglected, and turned his face, swearing, " as long 
as he his five wits had, to come in Court no more." He courted 
a widow, who shamelessly told him he had too little money for 
her : whereupon, in the rage of his disappointment, he broke his 
lute, burnt his books and MSS., and went abroad to the Emperor 
as a soldier of fortune. 

He served in Mary's wars with France in the last year of her 
reign ; was taken prisoner ; became very popular among the culti- 
vated French, and rewarded their courtesy by cleverly escaping 
to England. He lived through the whole of the reign of Eliza- 
beth, engaging in various warlike adventures, for which he seems 
to have received very poor recompense, and making some effort 
to live by his pen. His chief writings,^ besides the stories of Lord 
Mowbray and Shore's Wife in the ' Mirror for Magistrates,' were 
extracts from his own experience; — Churchyard's Chips, 1565; 
Churchyard's Choice, 1579 ; Churchyard's Charge, "a light bundle 
of lively discourses," 1580; Churchyard's Challenge, 1593; and 
Churchyard's Charity, " a musical consort of heavenly harmony," 
1595. In these works he appears as a garrulous, gossiping old 
fellow, fond of reciting his own exploits, and overflowing with good 
advice and general goodwill — on easy confidential terms with the 
pubhc. So far as his works afford indications, he was tolerably 
happy in his old age. There would seem to have been a change 
in his circumstances between 1565 and 1580. In 1565 he nar- 
rated his own life in most lugubrious Mirror for Magistrates strain, 
under the title of " A tragical discourse of the unhappy man's life." 
In 1578 he translated Ovid De Tristihus. But in 1580 he gave 
another version of his life in dancing ballad couplets as " a story 
translated out of French," dwelling with particular gusto on his 
powers of amusing and gaining the friendship of his enemies during 
his periods of captivity in Scotland and France. He kept on writ- 
ing with great activity till the very last, publishing no less than 
thirty-five works during the last twenty-five years of his long life. 
Such was the Nestor of the EHzabethan heroes. 



X. — Translators of Seneca and Ovid. 

Our translators were drawn to Seneca by the same feelings that 
led to the production of the * Mirror for Magistrates.' They found 
in him a similar vein of declamation on the downfall of greatness, 

1 For reprints see ' Bibliographical Miscellanies,' Oxford, 1813 ; Frondes CaduccB, 
Auchinleck Press, 1816-17; and (specially) 'Chips concerning Scotland,' edited, 
with Life, by George Chalmers, 1817. 



l6o RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

the evanescent character of prosperity, the slipperiness of the 
heights of pride. Thomas Newton, who collected the translations 
of the several tragedies in 158 1, enlarged expressly on their moral 
tone. He affected to believe that Seneca might be charged with 
encouraging ambition, cruelty, incontinence, &c. ; and affirmed in 
denial of any such charge that "in the whole catalogue of heathen 
writers there is none that does so much with gravity of philosophi- 
cal sentences, weightiness of sappy words, and authority of sound 
matter, to beat down sin, loose life, dissolute dealing, and unbridled 
sensuality." 

It is not worth while, if it were possible, to recall the personali- 
ties of the several translators. The first of them was Jasper Hey- 
wood, then an Oxford undergraduate, who set to work to translate 
the 'Troas,' immediately after the publication of the 'Mirror for 
Magistrates' in 1559. He was followed by Alexander Nevile, John 
Studley, and Thomas Nuce : and the separate translations were 
collected into one volume by Thomas Newton in 1581. The 
translations are avowedly free. In his preface to the ' Troas,' 
Heywood says that he has endeavoured to keep touch with the 
Latin, not word for word or verse for verse, but in such a way as 
to expound the sense ; and Nevile, who was but sixteen when he 
wrote, and whose preface is an amusing study of inflated precocity 
and stilted moralising, boldly affirmed his intention of wandering 
from his author, roving where he listed, adding and subtracting at 
pleasure. Of course none of the translators make the remotest 
approach to the style of Seneca : they simply transmute him into 
the poetical commonplaces of Lydgate and the ' Mirror.' Look, 
for instance, at Studley's rendering of the invocation of Medea in 
the Fourth Act : — 

" O flittering flocks of grisly ghosts 

that sit in silent seat, 
O ugsome Bugs, O Goblins grim 

of hell, I you entreat ! 
O lowering Chaos, dungeon blind 

And dreadful darken'd pit 
Where Ditis muffled up in clouds 

of blackest shades doth sit ! 
O wretched woful wawling souls 

your aid I do implore, 
That linked lie with jingling chains 

on wailing Limbo shore ! 
O mossy den where death doth couch 

his ghastly carrion face : 
Release your pangs, O sprites, and to 

this wedding hie apace. 
Cause ye the snaggy wheel to pause 

that rents the carcase bound; 
Permit Ixion's racked limbs 

to rest upon the ground; 



TRANSLATORS OF SENECA AND OVID. l6l 

Let hunger-bitten Tantalus 

with gaunt and pined paunch, 
Sup by Pirene's gulphed stream, 

his swelHng thirst to staunch." 

A collector of " sound and fury " would find many amusing 
passages in these translations. At the same time, the raw 
material, very raw though it was, may have been useful to Shake- 
speare or any dramatist that knew how to refine it. It is not im- 
possible that Shakespeare derived from these rude translations 
some hints for his incomparable studies of oppressed and desperate 
women. 

What drew Arthur Golding to translate Ovid's Metamorphoses, 
is hard to conjecture. If it had been Ovid's ' Art of Love,' one 
might have pointed to the translation as part of the amatory 
movement in literature, standing to the translation of Seneca as 
Tottel's Miscellany to the ' Mirror for Magistrates.' But Golding 
was not the sort of man from whom one would expect a transla- 
tion of an amatory work. He was an indefatigable translator 
from Latin, but his subjects generally were of a different cast. 
He began in 1562 by translating with fervent Protestant zeal 
a brief treatise on the burning of Bucer and Phagius in the time 
of Queen Mary, setting forth " the fantastical and tyrannous 
dealings of the Romish Church, together with the godly and 
modest reginient of the true Christian Church." The tract is 
picturesque and forcible. His next performance was a translation 
of Aretine's history of the wars between " the Imperials and the 
Goths for the possession of Italy," published in 1563. He trans- 
lated from Justin in 1564; Caesar's Commentaries in 1565; and 
numerous ecclesiastical and other works. His translation of 
Ovid's Metamorphoses was completed in 1567. It is not very 
exact, nor calculated to convey an idea of the poet's exquisite 
delicacy of expression ; but it was quite good enough to reveal 
to non-classical readers a new world of graceful fancies. Shake- 
speare must have revelled in it, denuding the exquisite fancies ot 
what was rough in the manner of their presentation, and letting 
them lie in his mind, and stimulate his imagination to beget many 
others of the same kind. The following is a specimen which may 
have been in Shakespeare's mind when he imagined the station of 
Mercury new lighted on a heaven-kissing hill : — 

"And thereupon he call'd his son that Maia had him born, 
Commanding Argus should be killed. He made no long abode, 
But tied his feathers to his feet, and took his charmed rod 
(With which he bringeth things asleep, and fetchcth souls from hell,) 
And put his hat upon his headj and when that all was well, 



l62 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 

He leaped from his father's towers and down to earth he flew, 

And there both hat and wings also he lightly from him threw, 

Retaining nothing but his staff, the which he closely held 

Between his elbow and his side, and through the common field 

Went plodding like some good plain soul that had some flock to feed." 

Prefixed to the work is an epistle also in Alexandrines, moralis- 
ing the various fables, asking the pious reader to understand good 
men by "gods," and to see in Fate and Fortune aspects of the 
eternal Providence ; and arguing that, though the Scriptures are 
the only true fountains of knowledge, yet much may be learnt 
from these pagan writers when rightly interpreted. The following 
is part of the moral of Phaeton : — 

*' This fable also doth advise all parents and all such 
As bring up youth to take good heed of cockering them too much." 



CHAPTER IV. 

EDMUND SPENSER. 

(1552-1598.) 

I. — His Life and Character. 

Although, in Dryden's phrase, " Spenser more than once insin- 
uates that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body," there 
can be no doubt that Spenser's chief impulse in the composition 
of his principal poem was derived from Ariosto and Tasso. It is, 
indeed, not difficult to adduce passages from the ' Faery Queen,' 
founded on Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory. Spenser was a 
most learned poet, more so probably than any great English poet, 
except Mr Swinburne ; and he assimilated and incorporated mate- 
rial from many predecessors — English, French, Italian, Latin, and 
Greek. " E. K.," the inspired commentator on his 'Shepherd's 
Calendar,' after enumerating as writers of pastoral poetry Theoc- 
ritus, Virgil, Mantuanus, Petrarca, and Boccaccio, comes finally to 
Marot, Sanazarro, " and also divers other excellent both Italian 
and French poets," and adds, " whose footing this author every- 
where followeth, yet so as few, but they be well scented, can trace 
him out." Our poet laid all under contribution, not stealing 
clumsily and mechanically, but using the products of other imagi- 
nations as food for his own. The Italian masters, undoubtedly, 
were his chief models and exemplars, although he never followed 
them to the oppression, still less to the suppression, of his own 
spirit. The ' Faery Queen ' is of the same kindred with the ' Or- 
lando Furioso ' and the ' Gerusalemme Liberata.' In Spenser's 
poem, perhaps, the allegory had greater generative force : but all 
three agree in the essential respect of having the elements of chiv- 
alrous romance used by great artists for purely artistic purposes. 

The translations of Ariosto and Tasso executed about the time 
of the appearance of the ' Faery Queen,' are a proof of the interest 



164 EDMUND SPENSER : 

then prevailing in these poems of chivalry. A translation of Ari- 
osto's ' Orlando Furioso,' by Sir John Harrington, was published 
in 1591 : one translation of Tasso's 'Godfrey of BuUoigne,' or 
'Jerusalem Delivered,' by Richard Carew, in 1594, and another, 
more celebrated, by Sir Edward Fairfax, in 1600. Both Harring- 
ton's and Fairfax's are smooth and copious, and supplied ' Eng- 
land's Parnassus ' with many choice extracts. They are in ottava 
rima, and are far from having Spenser's inimitable music ; yet, if 
an unobservant reader were set down to some of those extracts, 
the general resemblance of strain, of matter and imagery, is such 
that he would probably refer them at once to Spenser.^ 

Spenser's lineage and life have been made subjects for laborious 
inquiry and nice speculation. He was born in London, and is 
supposed to have belonged to a Lancashire branch of the ennobled 
family of Spencer. The date of his birth is generally fixed about 
1552. He entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar, in 1569 ; 
became B.A. in 1573, M.A. in 1576. After his residence at Cam- 
bridge, he is believed to have gone to the north of England ; to 
have returned south in 1578 by the advice of his college friend 
Gabriel Harvey ; and to have been introduced by Harvey to Sir 
Philip Sidney. Sidney and the Earl of Leicester took him by the 
hand and advanced his fortunes. 

In 1579 he dedicated to Sidney his first poetical effort, 'The 
Shepherd's Calendar,' containing twelve pastorals, one for each 
month, classified as moral, plaintive, and recreative. About this 
time, in his correspondence with Harvey, mention is made of 
various works now lost, but probably, with the exception of his 
' Nine Comedies,' partially embodied in what he afterwards pub- 
lished. By that time, also, he had begun the ' Faery Queen.' 

In 1580, at the age of twenty-seven, he entered upon official 
life : in that year he went to Ireland as secretary to the viceroy, 
Lord Grey. He is usually said to have returned to England in 
1582, when Lord Grey was recalled : and his business employment 
for the rest of his life is ignored. Only three facts are known, 
but they are significant. In 1581 he was appointed clerk to the 

1 Sir John Harrington might be taken as a typical Elizabethan courtier — a 
handsome young fellow, possessed of a keen eye for fun as well as for beauty, 
and a very ready command of language. Besides translating ' Orlando Furioso,' 
which the Queen is said to have imposed upon him as a punishment for translat- 
ing the episode of ' Alcina and Ruggiero,' he wrote epigrams, composed ' Polindor 
and Flostella,' a mock-heroic poem in couplets, full of fresh feeling and cleverness, 
and expounded the merits of one of the most valuable sanitary contrivances of 
civilised life in a prose treatise — ' Ajax Metamorphosed' — boiling over with gross 
Rabelaisian humour. Fairfax was a quieter man, of secluded studious habits. 
Dryden, in the preface to his fables, is loud in praise of the beauty of Fairfax's 
numbers, which, he says, Waller himself owned to have been his model, " Milton 
was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mi" Waller of Fairfax." 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. I65 

Irish Court of Chancery. In 1588 he resigned that appointment 
for the office of Clerk to the Council of Munster. In 1598 he 
was recommended by the Queen as a suitable person to be Sheriff 
of Cork ; but had to flee the country in less than a month after- 
wards. For eighteen years, therefore, with the exception of two 
brief ascertained visits to England, the author of the ' Faery 
Queen ' remained in Ireland, nominally at least, as an official 
clerk ; and the last appointment would seem to show that his 
duties were more than nominal, and were efficiently discharged. 
In 1586 his friends obtained for him a grant of three thousand 
acres of forfeited land at Kilcolman, near Cork. It being a con- 
dition of the grant that the holder should cultivate the soil, our 
poet probably at once went into residence. There, on the borders 
of a lake, amid beautiful scenery, with easy official duties, and 
with occasional visits from his friends — Sir Walter Raleigh among 
the number — he placidly elaborated his 'Faery Queen.' In 1590 
he crossed St George's Channel in Raleigh's company, with three 
books ready for the printer ; saw to the publication of them ; was 
introduced to Elizabeth ; and recrossed to Kilcolman, probably 
in the spring of 1591, with a substantial proof of her Majesty's 
favour in the shape of a grant for a yearly pension of fifty pounds, 
and the consequent honorary title of Poet- Laureate. In 1591, 
some minor poems of his were published, with or without his 
superintendence : " The Ruins of Time," " The Tears of the 
Muses," " Virgil's Gnat," " Prosopopoeia, or Mother Hubbard's 
Tale," " Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterfly," and " Visions 
of the World's Vanity." About the same time ^ he wrote his 
" Daphnaida," an elegy on the death of a noble lady. His next 
publications were in 1595 : when Ponsonby issued in separate 
volumes, and at different times, ' Colin Clout's Come Home 
Again' (a poem interesting from its allusions to his contempo- 
raries), along with a lament for Sir Philip Sidney, and his 
" Amoretti " and " Epithalamion," love-sonnets and a marriage- 
song, occasioned by his wooing and its successful termination in 
1594. In 1596 he went over to England and superintended the 
publication of three more Books of the ' Faery Queen,' along with 
a second edition of the first three. In the same year appeared 
in one volume his " Prothalamion " (spousal verses), the elegiac 
" Daphnaida " already mentioned, and four Hymns. In 1598 he 
was driven from Kilcolman by the outbreak of Tyrone's rebellion. 
His wife and himself escaped, but in the hurry and panic they left 
a little child behind them, and i^ever saw it again. Their house 
was sacked and burned. He died soon after in London, January 

1 Probably before. It is dated Jan. i, 1591 ; and we know (Preface to 
'Shepherd's Calendar") that Spenser made the year begin with January, and 
not, as was then usual, with March. 



l66 EDMUND SPENSER I 

1599. His ' View of the State of Ireland,' a prose dialogue, com- 
pleted in 1596, was not published till 1633. 

" Short curling hair, a full moustache, cut after the pattern of 
Lord Leicester's, close-clipped beard, heavy eyebrows, and under 
them thoughtful brown eyes, whose upper eyelids weigh them 
dreamily down ; a long and straight nose, strongly developed, 
answering to a long and somewhat spare face, with a well-formed 
sensible-looking forehead ; a mouth almost obscured by the mous- 
tache, but still showing rather full lips, denoting feeling, well set 
together, so that the warmth of feeling shall not run riot, with a 
touch of sadness in them ; — such is the look of Spenser, as his 
portrait hands it down to us." ^ 

What may have been the extent of his official duties we do not 
know ; but, to judge from internal evidence, no man ever lived 
more exclusively in and for poetry than Spenser. We try in vain 
for any image to express the voluptuous completeness of his im- 
mersion in the colours and music of poetry. He was a man of 
reserved and gentle disposition, and he turned luxuriously from the 
rough world of facts to the ampler ether, the diviner air, the 
softer and more resplendent forms of Arcadia, and the delightful 
land of Faery. While the dramatists were labouring to make the 
past present, his imagination worked in an opposite line : his 
effort was to remove hard, clear, visible, and tangible actualities 
to dreamy regions, and there to reproduce them in a glorified 
state with softer and warmer forms and colours, or, as the case 
might be, in a degraded state, with attributes exaggerated in 
hideousness. His own Pastoral land and P'aery land he had fur- 
nished with a geography, a population, and a history of their own, 
and there chiefly his imagination loved to dwell and pursue its 
creative work. But his spirit, restless and insatiate in its search 
for deliverance from the cold and definite world, never disdained 
to enter the abodes prepared by other poets. He expatiated freely 
through the realms of ancient mythology, and often soared up 
and poised his wing in mystical contemplation of love and 
beauty. 

More than one of Spenser's contemporaries expressed admira- 
tion of his " deep conceit." The luxuriance of leaf and blossom 
in his poems is deeply rooted in meditation. The profound alle- 
gory of the ' Faery Queen ' has been supposed to be alarming to 
the easy general reader ; and several critics, out of a laudable 
desire to extend Spenser's popularity, have assured us that we 
may give over all anxiety about the hidden meaning and yet lose 
none of the enjoyment of the plain story. If, indeed, we desire 

1 Rev. G. W. Kitchin, in Clarendon Press edition of ' Faery Queen.' 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER, 16/ 

to understand fully the rich activity and subtlety of the poet's 
imagination, we do well to get possession of the allegorical ground- 
work, and study from that point the luxuriant growth of enfolding 
images. But that effort is necessary only if we desire to feel 
stems growing and leaves and flowers bursting about us with un- 
ceasing energy and boundless profusion. 

Many have asserted, and Christopher North indignantly denied, 
that Spenser's imagination overpowered his judgment. The 
meaning of the assertors seems to be, that Spenser's fertile mind 
conceived many images that offend against good taste or that 
twine themselves together with bewildering intricacy, and his 
judgment was not strong enough to keep them back. In all such 
cases the critic can speak only for himself. Warton, and many 
sober-minded people who read poetry with a certain amount of 
pleasure, would doubtless often be bewildered and occasionally 
disgusted in journeying through the intricate paths and encounter- 
ing some of the monstrous personages of the land of Faery. 
Wilson was too enraptured with the poem to be conscious of any 
such faults : he was not, perhaps, so easily bewildered nor so 
easily disgusted by strongly painted " lumps of foul deformity." 

Spenser was not without a full share of the poet's alleged 
peculiar failings, vanity and irritability. Like Sir Walter Scott, 
our other great poet of chivalrous heroism, he loved to dwell on 
his ancestry : he somewhat ostentatiously claimed kindred with 
the noble house of Spencer. Over his natural pride in the exer- 
cise of his great gift, he spread but a thin disguise : his trans- 
parent compliments to himself are almost unique. He wrote, or 
procured or allowed a mysterious friend to write, under the initials 
E. K., an introduction and explanatory notes to his ' Shepherd's 
Calendar,' comparing this trial of his wings with similar essays by 
Theocritus and Virgil, and announcing him as " one that in time 
shall be able to keep wing with the best." Among the shepherds 
he represents himself under the names of CoHn Clout and young 
Cuddy, and makes other shepherds speak of these sweet players 
on the oaten pipe with boundless admiration as the joy of their 
fellows and the rivals of Calliope herself.^ As for the poet's 
irritability, that appears in the covert bitterness of his attacks on 
Roman Cathohcs and other subjects of his dislike, but most un- 
mistakably in his ' View of the State of Ireland.' His temper was 
too thin for the asperities of public hfe. These, however, are the 
unfavourable aspects of the poet's amiable nature. More favour- 
able aspects of the same reserved meditative disposition appear in 
his warm gratitude to benefactors, his passion for temperance and 
purity, and his deep religious earnestness. 

1 See also Appendix. 



l68 EDMUND SPENSER : 

II. — His Words, Metres, and General Form. 

Consistently with his shrinking from the cold realities of the 
present, Spenser gave a softer tinge to his diction by here and 
there introducing a word of the Chaucerian time. Even his dic- 
tion was to be slightly mellowed with antiquity ; he loved now 
and then to have upon his tongue a word with this soft unction 
round it. It is strange that the archaic character of his diction 
should ever have been doubted. The fact was recognised at the 
time. F. Beaumont, in an epistle prefixed to Speght's Chaucer, 
says that " Maister Spenser, following the counsel of Tully in De 
Of'atore for reviving of ancient words, hath adorned his own style 
with that beauty and gravity which Tully speaks of, and his much 
frequenting of Chaucer's ancient speeches causeth many to allow 
far better of him than otherwise they would." And a still better 
and earlier authority, the shadowy E. K., anticipated the objec- 
tions to disused words, saying that the poet, " having the sound of 
ancient poets still ringing in his ears, mought needs in singing, hit 
out some of their tunes." " But whether he useth them by such 
casualty and custom, or of set purpose and choice, as thinking 
them fittest for such rustical rudeness of shepherds, either for that 
their rough sounds would make his rhymes more ragged and 
rustical, or else because such old and obsolete words are most used 
of country folk, sure I think, and I think not amiss, that they 
bring great grace, and as one would say authority to the verse." 
" Ancient solemn words are a great ornament." " Tully saith that 
ofttimes an ancient word maketh the style seem grave, and as it 
were reverend, no otherwise than we honour and reverence grey 
hairs for a certain religious regard which we have of old age." 
Yet what Spenser prided himself upon was denied of him by some 
modern admirers, who thought it a detraction. 

Our poet had, however, in the rich music of his verse, a fuller 
protection to interpose between himself and the harsh discords of 
real life. He was a great metrician. With his friend Gabriel 
Harvey at Cambridge, with Sidney at Penshurst, with Raleigh at 
Kilcolman, his talk ran often on the subject of metres. He inter- 
ested himself in Harvey's enthusiasm for unrhymed dactylic hex- 
ameters ; but though he approved of them in theory, and produced 
a specimen with which he was himself highly pleased, he was not 
so unwise as to waste upon the experiment a poem of any length. 
Some of the stanzas in his ' Shepherd's Calendar ' are exceedingly 
pretty, particularly the light, airy, childlike jig of the contest 
between Perigot and Willy. But his greatest achievement was the 
stanza that bears his name, which he formed by adding an Alex- 
andrine to the stave used in Chaucer's Monk's Tale. In the last 



HIS WORDS, METRES, AND GENERAL FORM. 1 69 

great revival of poetry this stanza was warmly adopted. " All 
poets," says Wilson, " have, since Warton's time, agreed in think- 
ing the Spenserian stanza the finest ever conceived by the soul of 
man — and what various delightful specimens of it have we now 
in our language! Thomson's 'Castle of Indolence,' Shenstone's 
' Schoolmistress,' Seattle's ' Minstrel,' Burns's ' Cotter's Saturday 
Night,' Campbell's 'Gertrude of Wyoming,' Scott's 'Don Roder- 
ick,' Wordsworth's 'Female Vagrant,' Shelley's 'Revolt of Islam,' 
Keats's ' Eve of St Agnes,' Croly's ' Angel of the World,' Byron's 
*Childe Harold' !" It lends itself with peculiar harmony to im- 
passioned meditation and luxurious description. 

Spenser's sonnets, entitled "Amoretti," composed to commem- 
orate his love for the lady whom he afterwards married, are very 
intricate in form. They consist of three quatrains closed in by a 
couplet, the first quatrain being interwoven with the second and 
the second with the third. They obey the rule that confines each 
sonnet to a distinct idea. Their beauties, however, are wholly tech- 
nical ; their thin pale sentiments and frigid conceits are fatal to any- 
thing like profound human interest. 

Very different from the involved and timid sonnets is the trium- 
phant " Epithalamion," which celebrates the completion of the 
same courtship. I know no poem that realises so directly and 
vividly the idea of winged words : no poem whose verses soar and 
precipitate themselves with such a vehemence of impetuous ardour 
and exultation. 

Spenser followed the example of Virgil in trying his skill first 
upon pastoral poetry. This poetical exercise of his has been 
criticised by various standards, and pronounced wanting. The 
' Shepherd's Calendar ' was unhappily praised by Dryden as show- 
ing mastery of the northern dialect, and as being an exact imita- 
tion of Theocritus : this was subsequently seen to be a mistake, 
and, the standard of comparison being retained, Spenser was 
blamed because he did not imitate Theocritus. Amid the mass of 
confused criticism of these pastorals, where each critic pronounces 
from some vague ideal of what pastoral poetry ought to be, the 
fundamental objection has always been that they do not represent 
the actual life of shepherds. Shepherds in real life do not sit in 
the shade playing on pan-pipes, improvising songs for wagers of 
lambs and curiously carved bowls, and discoursing in rhymed 
verse about morality, religion, and politics. But it was not 
Spenser's design to paint real shepherds, or to copy the features 
of real pastoral life. His shepherds are allegorical representatives 
of his friends and his enemies, and exponents of his artistic, moral, 
and other theories, the whole drifted into a land of the imagina- 
tion. If we are asked why he chose such a disguise, we must go 



I/O EDMUND SPENSER: 

back to his character, nnd point to his turn for the picturesque, 
and his dehght in withdrawing from direct contact with the 
actual world. He loved to wrap hard facts in soft and picturesque 
allegory. Sir Philip Sidney killed at Zutphen becomes the shep- 
herd Astrophel of Arcadia torn to death by a savage beast, and 
transformed along with his love Stella into a red and blue flower 
like a star. Such an Arcadia is purely fanciful, and must be 
criticised as such not from an unsympathetic distance but out of 
the mood in which it was conceived. If, indeed, it is said that 
in the strictly pastoral parts of the poem, Spenser is far inferior to 
Theocritus, that he neglects the minuter daily and hourly changes 
of aspect in field and sky, and that there is too little sunshine in 
his Arcadia, one can understand this criticism as indicating posi- 
tive defects : the poet might have brought more of this into his 
Arcadia with the effect of enriching it, and without doing harm 
to his design. But we miss the whole intention and effect of the 
poetry if we exact from the poet an adherence to the conditions 
of the actual life of shepherds. The pictureqsue environment of 
hill, wood, dale, silly sheep and ravenous wild beasts, is all that 
the poet cares for : if he helps us to remember that we are 
amongst such scenery, he has fulfilled his design. We are not to 
look for North of England dialect or North of England scenery : 
if we would enjoy Spenser's Arcadia, we must simply let ourselves 
float into a dreamland of unsubstantial form and colour. The 
pastoral surroundings are of value only in so far as they colour 
and transfigure the sentiments of the poetry. 

It was again in professed imitation of Virgil that our poet 
raised his pipe '' from rustic tunes to chant heroic deeds." His 
knights are as shadowy as his shepherds. Spenser's design was 
not, like Sir Walter Scott's, to revive in imagination the manners, 
customs, and adventures of chivalry. In the ' Faery Queen,' as 
in the ' Shepherd's Calendar,' his design was to translate bare 
realities into poetical form and colour. Stating the general scope 
of the work, and passing over his adumbrations of living charac- 
ters, we may say that his knights and fair ladies are virtues 
impersonated ; his monsters and feigned fair ladies, vices imper- 
sonated. So far there is a resemblance between the ' Shepherd's 
Calendar ' and the ' Faery Queen ' : both lead us into allegorical 
worlds. But the two worlds are very different ; they rose up in 
the poet's imagination at the bidding of very different emotions. 
In the ' Shepherd's Calendar,' all is pan-piping and peace, com- 
posed sadness and grave moral reflection. In the ' Faery Queen,* 
on the other hand, we are brought into a land of storms and sun- 
shine, fierce encounter and rapturous love-making ; we are hurried 
in rapid change through lively emotions of mystery, terror, volup- 
tuous security, heartrending pity, and admiration of superhuman 



THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. I/I 

prowess — through various scenes, from the ^' Den of Error" to 
the " House of HoHness," from the " Bower of BHss " to the 
" Gardens of Adonis " : now hideousness triumphs, and beauty is 
in distress ; and anon the gates are burst open by a blast of 
Arthur's horn, or Britomart charges with her charmed spear. The 
pastoral allegory is insipid if we ignore the hidden meaning ; but 
Faery land is a land of wonder and beauty, where we need remem- 
ber the hidden meaning only if we desire to pay just homage to 
the genius of the poet. 

Dryden and many others have complained of occasional intri- 
cacy and incoherence in the ' Faery Queen.' The admirers of the 
poet should not meet this complaint by denying the fact : for a 
fact it is that Spenser does often violate the plain laws of space and 
time.^ To maintain coherence, prolonged actions must sometimes 
be supposed to happen in no time : and personages are sometimes 
present or absent as it suits the poet's convenience, coming or 
going without remark. The proper excuse is to say that the scene 
is laid " in the delightful land of Faery," where perplexity and con- 
fusion are as natural as in a dream. The real explanation probably 
is, that the poet wrote with great facility, and that in " winging his 
flight rapidly through the prescribed labyrinth of sweet sounds," 
he sometimes sang himself to sleep, and forgot exactly where he 
was. 

III. — The Chief Qualities of his Poetry. 

In Thomas Campbell's criticism of the ' Faery Queen,' it is said 
that, " on a comprehensive view of the whole work, we certainly 
miss the charm of strength, symmetry, and rapid or interesting 
progress." The criticism, like all others from the same pen, is 
carefully studied and just ; but it is somewhat starding without 
farther explanation of the terms. By rapid or interesting progress 
we must not understand rapid or interesting succession of events ; 
we must lay emphasis on the word progress. Incidents succeed 
one another quickly and suddenly as in a dream : but they do not 
progress with the interest of increasing suspense towards their pro- 
fessed end, the accomplishment of the commands of Gloriana, 
" that greatest glorious Queen of Faery land." Nor, had the poem 
been completed, is it easy to see how the additional cantos could 
have corrected what we have, and made part answer to part with 
even balance : the poet makes no apparent effort to proportion 
with nice care the weight and space assigned to each personage, 
situation, and adventure. This will be readily allowed. But the 
critic's meaning in saying that we miss the charm of strength, is 
more liable to be misunderstood. 

1 See, for very decided cases, Book IV., Cantos 8, 9, 10. 



172 EDMUND SPENSER ! 

If by " Strength " is meant the sentiment inspired by the ideal 
presence of superior might, then, so far from missing that charm 
in the ' Faery Queen,' we are kept under its fascination from be- 
ginning to end of the poem : imposing situations and mighty beings 
surround us on every hand. We are carried through waste wilder- 
nesses and interminable forests, the haunts of monsters and power- 
ful magicians : forests darkened by frightful shadows, and filled 
with sad trembling sounds. Hideous giants and dragons, puissant 
knights, enchanted weapons, grim caves, stately palaces, gloomy 
dungeons — these and suchlike conceptions in the ' Faery Queen ' 
occupy our imaginations with a perpetual stir of wonder, admira- 
tion, and awe. '' We do not often," says I. Disraeli, " pause at 
elevations which raise the feeling of the sublime." If that is so, 
which I very much doubt, it must be because, in that land of 
wonders, one thing is not felt to be more wonderful than another. 
We are sustained at a sublime elevation throughout : we move 
among the primeval elements of sublimity : even on the Idle Lake, 
or in the Bovver of Bliss, or in the Gardens of Adonis, where the 
senses ache with beauty, our voluptuous delight is permeated and 
elevated by the presence of supernatural agency. It may perhaps 
be pleaded by the nice discriminators of language that there is too 
much grotesqueness and excitement in Spenser's Faery land to war- 
rant the application of the term " sublime " : many, doubtless, 
would restrict the name to Miltonic sublimity, the steady planetary 
sublimity that overawes into calmmess. Spenser, it is true, sustains 
us at a different pitch from Milton. To come fully under the spell 
of the ' Faery Queen,' we must make ourselves as little children 
listening to the wondrous tales of a nurse : the very diction has in 
it something of the affected strange words, feigned excitement, 
and mouthed tones of softness and wonder put on by a skilful 
story-teller to such an audience : and when we yield ourselves 
to the poet in such a spirit, he makes our hearts throb with 
the same absorbing emotions. Of these emotions perhaps the 
most fitting names are wonder and dread ; but they are also fitly 
termed modes of sublimity, when they rise to a certain pitch. 
We should call both Milton and Spenser sublime, but sublime in 
different ways. 

What then did Campbell mean by saying that in the ' Faery 
Queen ' we miss the charm of strength ? He meant, probably, 
the strength arising from clearness and brevity of expression : in 
description, he says, Spenser " exhibits nothing of the brief strokes 
and robust power which characterise the very greatest poets." It 
would perhaps be more accurate to say that the brief strokes are 
supplemented and their abrupt concentrated effect weakened or 
at least softened by subsequent diffusion. Compare, for example, 
with Lucrece's frantic exclamations against Night, the following 



THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 1 73 

by impatient Arthur when darkness comes between him and his 
pursuit of Florimel (iii. 4) : — 

" Night ! thou foul mother of annoyance sad, 

Sister of heavy Death, and nurse of Woe, 

"Which wast begot in Heaven, but for thy bad 

And brutish shape thrust down to Hell below, 

Where by the grim flood of Cocytus slow, 

Thy dwelling is in Erebus' black house, 

(Black Erebus, thy husband, is the foe 

Of all the gods) where thou ungracious 
Half of thy days dost lead in horror hideous. 

What had the Eternal Maker need of thee, 
The world in his continual course to keep. 
That dost all things deface, ne lettest see 
The beauty of his work? Indeed in sleep 
The slothful body that doth love to steep 
His lustless limbs, and drown his baser mind, 
Doth praise thee oft, and oft from Stygian deep. 
Calls thee his goddess, in his error blind. 
And great dame Nature's handmaid cheering every kind. 

But well I wot that to an heavy heart. 
Thou art the root and nurse of bitter cares, 
Breeder of new, renewer of old smarts; 
Instead of sleep thou lendest railing tears, 
Instead of sleep thou sendest troublous fears 
And dreadful visions, in the which alive 
The dreary image of sad Death appears : 
So from the weary spirit thou dost drive 
Desired rest, and men of happiness deprive. 

Under thy mantle black there hidden lie 
Light-shunning Theft, and traitorous Intent, 
Abhorred Bloodshed, and vile Felony, 
Shameful Deceit, and Danger imminent. 
Foul Horror, and eke hellish Dreariment : 
All these I wot in thy protection be, 
And light do shun for fear of being shent : 
For light y-like is loathed of them and thee; 
And all that lewdness love do hate the light to see." 

Here we have no lack of brief strokes, but they are not final and 
solitary : the poet does not leave his conceptions pent up and 
struggling with repressed force, but expands them into sublime 
images. Another way of understanding how Spenser's wide ex- 
pansive manner is opposed to abrupt strength, would be to 
compare any of his pitched duels with similar performances by 
Mr Tennyson, in which brevity and symmetry are carried almost 
to the pitch of burlesque. Compare, for example, the encounter 
of Guyon and Britomart (iii. i), with the fight between Gareth 
and the Evening Star. 



174 EDMUND SPENSER: 

The visit of Duessa to Dame Night, and the journey of the 
weird pair to bring the wounded Sansjoy to ^sculapius, who had 
been thrust down to hell by the jealousy of Jove, is a passage of 
magnificent power ; the terrible figure of the ancient but still 
mighty mother out of whose womb came earth and the ruler of 
heaven and earth, at whose presence dogs bay, owls shriek, and 
wolves howl, and whose arrival causes such excitement amidst the 
ghastly population of hell, is quite a typical conception of wild 
Gothic grandeur (I. 5) : — 

" So wept Duessa until eventide 
That shining lamps in Jove's high house were light. 
Then forth she rose, ne longer would abide, 
But comes unto the place where the heathen knight 
In slumbering swound, nigh void of vital sprite, 
Lay covered with enchanted cloud all day : 
Whom when she found, as she him left in flight, 
To wail his woful case she would not stay. 

But to the eastern coast of Heaven makes speedy way. 

Where grisly Night, with visage deadly sad. 
That Phoebus' cheerful face durst never view, 
And in a foul black pitchy mantle clad, 
She finds forth coming from her darksome mew, 
Where she all day did hide her hated hue. 
Before the door her iron chariot stood, 
Already harnessed for journey new, 
And coal-black steeds yborn of hellish brood 
That on their rusty bits did champ as they were wood. 

Who when she saw Duessa, sunny bright, 
Adorned with gold and jewels shining clear, 
She greatly grew amazed at the sight, 
And the unacquainted light began to fear, 
(For never did such brightness there appear); 
And would have back retired to her cave, 
Until the witch's speech she gan to hear. 
Saying — 'Yet, O thou dreaded dame, I crave 
Abide, till I have told the message which I have.' 

She stayed; and forth Duessa gan proceed : 
' O thou, most ancient grandmother of all, 
More old than Jove, wliom thou at first didst breed, 
Or that great house of gods celestial : 
Which was begot in Demogorgon's hall. 
And sawest the secrets of the world unmade ! 
Why sufferest thou thy nephews dear to fall 
With elfin sword, most shamefully betrayed? 
Lo, where the stout Sansjoy doth sleep in deadly shade! 

'And, him before, I saw with bitter eyes 
The bold Sansjoy shrink underneath his spear: 
And now the prey of fowls in field he lies, 
Nor wailed of friends nor laid on groaning bier, 
That whilom was to me too dearly dear. 



THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRV. 1/5 

Oh ! what of gods them boots it to be born 
If old Aveugle's sons so evil hear? 
Or who shall not great Nightes children scorn, 
When two of three her nephews are so foul forlorn? 

'Up, then; up, dreary dame, of darkness queen! 
Go, gather up the relics of thy race ! 
Or else go them avenge; and let be seen 
That dreadest Night in brightest day hath place, 
And can the children of fair Light deface ! ' 
Her feeling speeches some compassion moved 
In heart, and change in that great mother's face; 
Yet pity in her heart was never proved 
Till then, for evermore she hated, never loved. 



Then to her iron wagon she betakes, 
And with her bears the foul well-favoured witch; 
Through mirksome air her ready way she makes. 
Her twofold team (of which two black as pitch, 
And two were brown, yet each to each unlitch) 
Did softly swim away, ne ever stamp 
Unless she chanced their stubborn mouths to twitch; 
Then, foaming tar, their bridles they would champ. 
And trampling the tire element would fiercely ramp. 

So well they sped that they be come at length 
Unto the place whereas the Paynim lay 
Devoid of outward sense and native strength, 
Covered with charmed cloud from view of day 
And sight of men since his late luckless fray. 
His cruel wounds with cruddy blood congealed 
They binden up so wisely as they may. 
And handle softly till they can be healed; 
So lay him in her chariot close in night concealed. 

And all the while she stood upon the ground, 
The wakeful dogs did never cease to bay; 
As giving warning of the unwonted sound, 
With which her iron wheels did them affray. 
And her dark grisly look them much dismay. 
The messenger of death, the ghastly owl. 
With dreary shrieks did also her bewray ; 
And hungry wolves continually did howl 
At her abhorred face, so filthy and so foul. 

Thence turning back in silence soft they stole, 
And brought the heavy corse with easy pace 
To yawning gulf of deep Avernus hole; 
By that same hole an entrance, dark and base, 
With smoke and sulphur hiding all the place, 
Descends to Hell; there creature never past. 
That back returned without heavenly grace; 
But dreadful furies, which their chains have brast. 
And damned sprites sent forth to make ill men aghast. 



176 EDMUND SPENSER : 

By that same way the direful dames do drive 
Their mournful chariot, filled with rusty blood, 
And down to Pluto's house are come belive : 
Which passing through on every side there stood 
The trembling ghosts with sad amazed mood, 
Chattering their iron teeth and staring wide 
With stony eyes; and all the hellish brood 
Of fiends infernal flocked on every side 
To gaze on earthly wight that with the night durst ride," 

Other celebrated passages of powerful composition in the ^ Faery 
Queen' are — the Cave of Despair (i. 9) ; the fight between St 
George and the Dragon, where the partition between the sublime 
and the ridiculous is specially thin (i. 11) ; the Cave of Mammon 
(ii. 7) ; the despair of Malbecco (end of iii. 10) ; the house of 
Ate (iv. i) ; the protracted tournaments in iv. 3 and iv. 4; the 
exploits of Arthegal and Talus (v. 2). The situation of Britomart 
in the forest when her companions suddenly disappear in chase 
of the sudden apparition of Florimel and the foster (iii. i) ; and 
her situation in the enchanter's palace when the house is shaken 
and the doors clapped by the sudden whirlwind that preludes the 
Mask of Cupid (iii. 12), maybe mentioned as specially effective 
movements. The action of Britomart's enchanted spear through- 
out Books iii. and iv. would satisfy Campbell's desideratum of a 
" brief stroke " : there is, however, a touch of the ludicrous in the 
amazement of the unhorsed champions. 

Spenser's Arcadia is not a region of absolutely unruffled peace, 
seeing that some of the poet's shepherds are sufficiently miserable 
and irate to have recourse to satire. Satire, however, in the 
mouths of creatures so simple and shadowy, cannot sound harsh 
and biting : it rather amuses us gently than fills us with sym- 
pathetic bitterness. Most of the poems in the ' Shepherd's 
Calendar ' fall under the heads " recreative " and " plaintive." 
The pictures of pastoral recreation are very sweet and pretty. In 
the eclogue for May, old Palinode thus exquisitely describes a 
merry-making of the young folks, and sighs that his old limbs are 
now too stiff for the furious glee of their innocent sports : — 

*' Sicker this morrow, no longer ago, 
I saw a shoal of shepherds outgo 
With singing, and shouting, and jolly cheer: 
Before them yode a lusty tabrere, 
That to the menyie a horn-pipe played. 
Whereto they dancen each one with his maid. 
To see those folks make such jovisance. 
Made my heart after the pipe to dance. 
Tho to the greenwood they speeden hem all. 
To fetchen home May with their musical; 



THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. I// 

And home they bringen in a royal throne, 

Crowned as king; and his queen attone 

Was lady Flora, on whom did attend 

A fair flock of fairies, and a fresh bend 

Of lovely nymphs. O that I were there, 

To helpen the ladies their May bush to bear ! " 

But his pastoral lays and ditties, with their cold atmosphere and 
simple staves, become intolerably tame and insipid after the 
wondrous beauties and full rich music of the ' Faery Queen.' 
With all its lofty character as a chronicle of martial deeds, and 
though the stately Muse is here presented " with quaint Bellona 
in her equipage," the softer passages will always be read as the 
most incomparable fruits of the poet's genius. The Idle Lake 
(ii. 6), the Bower of Bliss (ii. 12), and the Gardens of Adonis 
(iii. 6), are unrivalled as pictures of voluptuous dreamy delight. 
Una among the worshipping Satyrs, with the fair Hamadryades 
and light-foot Naiades running to see her lovely face (i. 6) ; 
the huntress Belphoebe with her broad forehead stepping forth 
from the thicket (ii. 3) ; the courting of Florimel by the witch's 
son (iii. 7) ; Pastorella among the shepherds (vi. 9), — are pictures 
that touch our fancies with a livelier, less languid, but not less 
exquisite, sense of beauty. Again in the fourth canto of the 
Third Book, which describes the Rich Strand or Pretious Shore 
of Marinell, and the journey of sad Cymoent with her team of 
dolphins over the broad round back of Neptune, the voluptuous 
elements of the description are interpenetrated by the impassioned 
grief of the goddess for her beloved son, and the hushed anxiety 
and tender handling of the sympathising nymphs ; in that passage 
we taste the last extreme of tender ecstasy : — 

" Eftsoons both flowers and garlands far away 
She flung, and her fair dewy locks yrent; 
To sorrow huge she turned her former play, 
And gamesome mirth to grievous dreariment : 
She threw herself down on the continent, 
Ne word did speak but lay as in a swown. 
Whiles all her sisters did for her lament 
With yelling outcries, and with shrieking sown; 
And every one did tear her garland from her crown. 

Soon as she up out of her deadly fit 
Arose, she bade her chariot to be brought; 
And all her sisters that with her did sit, 
Bade eke at once their chariots to be sought : 
Tho full of bitter grief and pensive thought 
She to her wagon clomb : clomb all the rest 
And forth together went with sorrow fraught: 
The waves obedient to their behest 
Them yielded ready passage and their rage surceast. 



1/8 EDMUND SPENSER : 

Great Neptune stood amazed at their sight, 
Whiles on his broad round back they softly slid, 
And eke himself mourned at their mournful plight, 
Yet wist not what their wailing meant, yet did 
For great compassion of their sorrow, bid 
His mighty waters to them buxom be : 
Eftsoons the roaring billows still abid, 
And all the grisly monsters of the sea 
Stood gaping at their gait, and wondered them to see. 

A team of dolphins ranged in array 
Drew the smooth chariot of sad Cymoent; 
They were all taught by Triton to obey 
To the long reins at her commandement : 
As swift as swallows on the waves they went, 
That their broad flaggy fins no foam did rear, 
Ne bubbling roundel they behind them sent; 
The rest of other fishes drawen were 
"Which with their finny oars the swelling sea did shear. 

Soon as they been arrived on the brim 
Of the rich strond, their chariots they forbore. 
And let their timid fishes softly swim 
Along the margent of the foamy shore, 
Lest they their fins should bruise, and surbate sore 
Their tender feet upon the stony ground : 
And coming to the place where all in gore 
And cruddy blood enwallowed they found 
The luckless Marinell lying in deadly swound. 

His mother swooned thrice, and the third time 
Could scarce recovered be out of her pain ; 
Had she not been devoid of mortal slime, 
She should not then have been relieved again : 
But soon as life recovered had the rein. 
She made so piteous moan and dear waiment, 
That the hard rocks could scarce from tears refrain; 
And all her sister nymphs with one consent 
Supplied her sobbing breaches with sad complement. 



Thus when they all had sorrowed their fill. 
They softly gan to search his grisly wound : 
And that they might him handle more at will, 
They him disarmed; and spreading on the ground 
Their watchet mantles fringed with silver round. 
They softly wiped away the jelly blood 
From the orifice; which having well upbound. 
They poured in sovereign balm and nectar good, 
Good both for earthly medicine and for heavenly food. 

Tho, when the lily-handed Liagore 
(This Liagore whilom had learned skill 
In leech's craft, by great Apollo's lore, 
Sith her whilom upon high Pindus hill 
He loved, and at last her womb did fill 



THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 179 

With heavenly seed, whereof wise Paeon sprung) 
Did feel his pulse, she knew there stayed still 
Some little life his feeble sprites among; 
Which to his mother told, despair she from her flung. 

Tho, up him taking in their tender hands 
They easily unto her chariot bear; 
Her team at her commandment quiet stands, 
Whiles they the corse into her wagon rear, 
And strow with flowers the lamentable bier; 
Then all the rest into their coaches climb. 
And through the brackish waves their passage shear; 
Upon great Neptune's neck they softly swim, 
And to her watery chamber swiftly carry him. 

Deep in the bottom of the sea her bovver 
Is built of hollow billows heaped high, 
Like to thick clouds that threat a stormy shower, 
And vaulted all within like to the sky, 
In which the gods do dwell eternally; 
There they him laid in easy couch well dight, 
And sent in haste for Tryphon, to apply 
Salves to his wounds, and medicines of might : 
For Tryphon of sea-gods the sovereign leech is hight." 

To get a full notion of Spenser's power of " ravishing human 
sense" with word-music, one must read at least a canto, if not 
a whole book of the ' Faery Queen.' The dreamy melodious soft- 
ness of his numbers and his ideas has something of the luxurious 
charm that the song of the mermaids had for the ear of Guyon 
(Book ii. Canto 12) : — 

" And now they nigh approached to the stead 
Whereas those mermaids dwelt; it was a still 
And calmy bay, on th' one side sheltered 
With the broad shadow of an hoary hill. 

So now to Guyon as he passed by. 
Their pleasant tunes they sweetly thus appplied; 
* O thou fair son of gentle Faery, 
Thou art in mighty arms most magnified 
Above all knights that ever battle tried : 
O turn thy rudder hitherward awhile ! 
Here may thy storm-beat vessel safely ride; 
This is the port of rest from troublous toil, 
The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil.' 

With that the rolling sea, resounding soft, 
In his big base them fitly answered ; 
And on the rock the waves breaking aloft 
A solemn mean unto them measured; 
The whiles sweet Zephyrus loud whistleled 
His treble — a strange kind of harmony, 
Which Guyon's senses softly tickeled. 
That he the boatman bade row easily 
And let him hear some part of their rare melody." 



l80 EDMUND SPENSER: 

It is usually said that Spenser has no humour. His humour, 
indeed, is of the most quiet and lurking order, and may easily 
pass unobserved among so many objects of wonder and beauty. 
But though unobtrusive it is nevertheless there. The drowsy 
irritability of Morpheus (i. i), and the idiotic " He could not tell " 
of the grave and reverend Ignaro (i. 8), are in the most delicate 
vein of humour. Archimago's disguise as a hermit, and his affec- 
tation of childish senility and unworldly simplicity, are also very 
delicately touched off : the enemy of mankind appears as — 

" An aged sire, in long black weeds y-clad, 

His feet all bare, his beard all hoary grey, 

And by his belt his book he hanging had; 

Sober he seem'd and very sagely sad ; 

And to the ground his eyes were lowly bent, 

Simple in shew, and void of malice bad; 

And all the way he prayed as he went, 
And often knocked his breast, as one that did repent. 

He fair the knight saluted, louting low, 
Who fair him quited, as that courteous was; 
And after asked him, if he did know 
Of strange adventures, which abroad did pass, 
* Ah ! my dear son,' quoth he, ' how should, alas ! 
Silly old man that lives in hidden cell. 
Bidding his beads all day for his trespass. 
Tidings of war and worldly trouble tell ? 
With holy father sits not with such things to mell.' " 

We may be certain, from Spenser's antipathy to the Roman 
Catholics, that this was a character in one of the lost nine 
Comedies : the sudden casting off of the disguise, and the flaming 
out in his true colours as — 

" A bold bad man ! that dared to call by name 
Great Gorgon, prince of darkness and dead night — " 

would have been a startling effect. 

The most openly humorous character in the ' Faery Queen ' is 
Braggadocio, whose behaviour is often farcical. See his bold 
pretences to Archimago, and his abject terror and ignominious 
skulking, in Book ii. 3. 

Spenser has been accused of bad taste in mixing up heathen 
mythology with the narratives of the Bible. In Book ii. Canto 7, 
he represents Tantalus and Pontius Pilate as suffering in the same 
place of punishment. The answer that wicked men of all ages 
and creeds may reasonably be supposed to suffer together, is 
complete. 

He has also been accused of interfering with ancient mythology, 



THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. l8l 

marrying Clio to Apollo, making Cupid the sister of the Graces, 
bringing Neptune to the marriage of the Thames and the Medway, 
and adding without authority to Neptune's retinue. On this great 
liberty I do not venture to pronounce. 

He has been accused of extravagant violations of probability. 
To this it may be answered that, when we consent to be introduced 
to Faery land, we sign a dispensation from the ordinary conditions 
of Hfe. 

These charges are frivolous : much more plausibility attaches to 
his alleged transgressions of the boundary between pleasure and 
disgust. The picture of Error is said to be intolerably loathsome — 

" Therewith she spevv'd out of her filthy maw 
A flood of poison horrible and black, 
Full of great lumps of flesh and gobbets raw, 
Which stunk so vilely that it forc'd him slack 
His grasping hold, and from her turn aback; 
Her yomit full of books and papers was, 
With loathly frogs and toads, which eyes did lack, 
And creeping sought way in the weedy grass; 

Her filthy parbreak all the place defiled has." 

The picture of Duessa unmasked is still more disgusting. And 
yet Burke is said to have been fond of quoting the description of 
Error. To persons of sober refinement, for whom the energy of 
indignant disgust has no fascination but is merely repulsive, such 
passages can be justified only as being occasional discords, height- 
ening by contrast the surrounding harmonies, or at the worst, 
disagreeable episodes tided over by the general sublimity and 
beauty. Yet the critic should not ignore the fact that great poets 
of our race have created such passages, and that many readers are 
drawn to them by irresistible fascination. It is a paradox that 
descriptions of things so foul and odious should possess any spell : 
but it is not to be denied that they do possess a strong spell, and 
that for minds of the most poetical constitution. Spenser's design 
may have been entirely moral in drawing repulsive pictures of 
Error and Popery ; but there is, whatever may have been his 
design, a certain intrinsic charm of sublime exaltation in the 
supreme energy of loathing. 



CHAPTER V. 
ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

The last ten or fifteen years of the sixteenth century was a period 
of amazing poetic activity : there is nothing hke it in the history 
of our literature. Never in any equal period of our history did so 
much intellect go to the making of verses. They had not then 
the same number of distracting claims : literary ambition had 
fewer outlets. Carlyle, Grote, Mill, Gladstone, Disraeli, had they 
lived in the age of Elizabeth, would all have had to make their 
literary reputation in verse, and all might have earned a respect- 
able place among our poets — might, at least, like Francis Bacon, 
have composed some single piece of sufficient excellence to be 
thought worthy of the 'Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics.' 
Amidst a general excitement and ambition of fame the gift of 
song may be brought to light where in less favourable circum- 
stances it might have been extinguished by other interests. And 
the rivalry of men endowed with eager and powerful intellects 
must always act as a stimulus to the genuine poet, although all 
their efforts come short of the creations of genius. 

Three fashions of love-poetry may be particularised as flourish- 
ing with especial vigour during those ten or fifteen years — pastoral 
songs and lyrics, sonnets, and tales of the same type as Venus and 
Adonis. Spenser did much to confirm if not to set the pastoral 
fashion ; but perhaps still more was done by Sir Philip Sidney 
with his 'Arcadia' and his sonnets of Astrophel to Stella. These 
two poets leading the way to the sweet pastoral country of craggy 
mountain, hill and valley, dale and field, the greater portion of 
the tuneful host crowded after them, transforming themselves into 
Damons, Dorons, and Coridons, and piping to cruel Phillises, 
PhilHdas, and Carmelas.^ Out of this masquerading grew many 

1 The land of ideal shepherds was only one of the ideal countries frequented by 
the artistic courtiers of Elizabeth. They were as eager to descry new worlds of 
imagination as her navigators were to discover new regions in the terraqueous 
globe. In the masques presented at Court we find inhabitants of four great worlds 
or continents — the country of Shepherds, the country of Faeries, the Mythological 
world, and the world of Personified Abstractions. 



ELIZABETHAN LOVE-POETRY. 1 83 

beautiful lyrics. ' England's Helicon,' which was published in 
1600, and which gathered the harvest of this pastoral poetry, is 
by many degrees the finest of the numerous miscellanies of the 
Elizabethan age. It contained selections from Spenser, Sidney, 
Greene, Lodge, J. Wootton, Bolton, Barnefield, " Shepherd Tonie," 
Drayton, Shakespeare, and others of less note. 

Many of these pastorals took the form of sonnets, but I 
single out sonnet-writing as a fashion by itself, in order to draw 
attention to the numerous bodies of sonnets published in the last 
decade of the century as lasting monuments of sustained passion, 
real or ideal. The list is very remarkable. It opens with the 
publication of "Sidney's sonnets to Stella in 1591, and includes — 
Daniel's sonnets to Deha, pubhshed in 1592 ; Constable's sonnets 
to Diana, 1592 ; Lodge's sonnets to Phillis, 1593 ; Watson's Tears 
of Fancy, or Love Disdained, 1593 ; Drayton's Idea's Mirror, 
"amours in quatorzains," in 1594; and Spenser's Amoretti or 
Sonnets in 1596.^ 

Hardly less notable is the fancy for short mythological or 
historical love- tales. The way in this form of composition was 
led by Thomas Lodge, who published in 1589 the poem of 
* Glaucus and Scylla,' narrating with many pretty circumstances 
the cruelty of Scylla to Glaucus, in punishment whereof she was 
transformed into a dangerous rock on the coasts of Sicily. Mar- 
lowe began and Chapman finished the tale of Hero and Leander ; 
Shakespeare sang the love of Venus and Adonis : Drayton the 
love of Endymion and Phoebe ; Chapman (in ' Ovid's Banquet of 
Sense ') the love of Ovid and Julia. The voluptuous descriptions 
of these tales could not have been expected to go on without 
sooner or later exciting the spirit of derisive parody : and accord- 
ingly, in 1598, Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" was rudely 
burlesqued by the satirical Marston in a comical version of the 
tale of " Pygmalion and Galatea." To prevent any undue indig- 
nation at the liberty thus taken with our great dramatist, I may 
here intimate a suspicion, for which I shall afterwards produce 
some grounds, that certain of Shakespeare's sonnets — those, 
namely, from the 127th to the 15 2d inclusive — were designed to 
ridicule the effusions of some of his seriously or feignedly love-sick 
predecessors. Marston's profane parody may thus assume the 
aspect of a Nemesis. 

The enthusiasm of beauty was strong in the Elizabethan poets. 
With many of them it was a fierce and earnest thirst. Their 
lives were hot, turbulent, precarious : they turned often to the 
bloom of fair cheeks and the lustre of bright hair as a passionate 
relief from desperate fortunes. Beauty was pursued by Greene 

1 In this chapter I have used the order of the pubhcation of these sonnets as a 
basis of arrangement for the predecessors of Shakespeare in that form of composi- 
tion. 



1 84 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

and Marlowe not as a luxury but as a fierce necessity — as the 
ipily thing that could make life tolerable. Such visions as Hero 
and fair Samela filled them with mad ecstasy in the height of 
their intemperate orgies, and were called back for soothing 
worship in their after-fits of exhaustion and savage despondency. 
In many others of calmer and more temperate lives, beauty 
excited less ardent transports, and yet was a powerful influence. 
Beauty was a very prevailing religion ; the perfections of woman, 
excellence of eye, of lip, of brow, were meditated on and adored 
with devout rapture ; and though the votary's enthusiasm in 
some cases travelled into licentio-us delirium, in gentler natures it 
bred soft and delicate fancies, of the most exquisite tenderness. 
Beauty was part of all their lives, and shaped itself in each mind 
according to the soil. A very surprising number of different soils 
it found to grow in, and very remarkable were the products. One 
meets the same flowers again and again, but always with some in- 
dividual grace. Even third-rate and fourth-rate poets do not seem 
to be weaving garlands of flowers plucked from the verses of the 
masters : they develop the common seeds in their own way. Con- 
sider, for example, the following madrigal by John Wootton, 
a name now utterly forgotten by the generality, and a poet of 
whose personality nothing survives but his name and his contribu- 
tions to ' England's Helicon : ' — - 

" Her eyes like shining lamps in midst of night, 
Night dark and dead : 
Or as the stars that give the seamen light, 
Light for to lead 
Their wandering ships. 

Amidst her cheeks the rose and lily strive, 

Lily snow-white : 
When their contend doth make their colour thrive, 

Colour too bright 

For shepherd's eyes. 

Her lips like scarlet of the finest dye, 

Scarlet blood-red : 
Teeth white as snow, which on the hills doth lie, 

Hills overspread 

By Winter's force. 

Her skin as soft as is the finest silk. 

Silk soft and fine : 
Of colour like unto the whitest milk, 

Milk of the kine 

Of Daphnis' herd. 

As swift of foot as is the pretty roe. 

Roe swift of pace : 
When yelping hounds pursue her to and fro, 

Hounds fierce in chase 

To reave her life." 



SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. I85 

I. — Sir Philip Sidney^ (1554-15S6). 

In 159T a volume of sonnets was issued under the editorship of 
Thomas Nash, containing Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella," twenty- 
eight sonnets by Samuel Daniel, and other poems by " Divers 
Noblemen and Gentlemen." The pubHcation was most probably 
surreptitious : Daniel, who pubhshed his " Sonnets to Delia " in 
the following year, complained that " a greedy printer had pub- 
lished some of his sonnets along with those of Sir Philip Sidney ; " 
and a corrected and authentic edition of Sidney's sonnets was 
issued before the close of 1591. 

The main attraction of Nash's volume was the " Astrophel and 
Stella " series of sonnets ; this was the title of the work, the other 
poems being merely appended. The editor extolled Sidney with 
characteristic eloquence and extravagance. He apologises for com- 
mending a poet " the least syllable of whose name, sounded in the 
ears of judgment, is able to give the meanest line he writes a 
dowry of immortality." He deplores the long absence of Eng- 
land's Sun, and ridicules the gross fatty flames that have wandered 
abroad like hobgoblins with a wisp of paper at their tails in the 
middest eclipse of his shining perfections. " Put out your rush 
candles, you poets and rhymers," he cries ; '' and bequeath your 
crazed quatorzains to the chandlers ; for lo ! here he cometh that 
hath broken your legs." 

The story of the romantic passion between Sidney and Penelope 
Devereux, Astrophel and Stella, is well known to readers of literary 
history. Lady Penelope, sister of the unfortunate Earl of Essex, 
was some nine years younger than her distinguished lover. Her 
father had formed a high opinion -of Sir Philip's promise, and on 
his deathbed expressed a wish for their union : but her guardians 
were in favour of a wealthier match, and two or three years after 
the old Earl's death, she was married at the age of seventeen, 
much against her own wishes, to an unattractive young nobleman. 
Lord Rich. This event may have been hastened by Sidney's 
attitude before the marriage. If his self-reproaches in the sonnets 
were well founded, he would seem to have been undecided and 
vacillating in his addresses, his natural impulses being obstructed 
by a pedantic fancy that love was unworthy of a great thinker 
like himself — perhaps a temporary result of his correspondence 
with Languet : but when the lady was married out of his reach, 
his love became most ardent, and he courted her favours in a long 
series of passionate sonnets. Seeing that he very soon after mar- 
ried another lady — a daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham -7- it 

1 I have given some account of Sidney's life and character in my Manual of 
English Prose Literature, and shall here confine myself to his sonnets. 



1 86 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

might with some reason be inferred that there was in Sidney's as 
in other sonnets not a Httle make-beheve passion, and that his 
dehght as an ambitious young poet at finding such an amount of 
literary capital was quite as strong as the pain of the disappoint- 
ment. Certainly, however. Lady Rich, whose rare charms of beauty 
and wit were the theme of many celebrated EHzabethan pens, was 
likely enough to be the object of a genuine passion. As the wife 
of a man whom she disliked and kept in thorough fear and subjec- 
tion, and as the sister of an ambitious nobleman nearly related to 
the throne, she led as she advanced in years a brilliant and a 
troubled hfe, and was in the Court of England the most -conspic- 
uous and fascinating woman of her generation. When Sidney 
wrote his sonnets she was in the prime of her beauty, and he may 
well have been sincere in deploring the loss of such a prize, and 
praying in wailful sonnets that he might continue to have a place 
in her affections. 

In the choice of ideas for his sonnets Sidney prided himself on 
being original.^ This was a natural reaction from the long line of 
imitators between Surrey and himself. In Watson's ' Hecatom- 
pathia, or Passionate Century of Love,' published in 1582, about 
the time when Sidney was composing his sonnets, the imitative 
and artificial character of the fashionable English love-poetry was 
specially illustrated by the candid acknowledgments of the accom- 
panying notes. The poet makes no pretence to spontaneous effu- 
sion. Prefixed to the many ingenious praises of his lady's beauty, 
and allegations of her cruelty, and his own varied professions of un- 
alterable love and consuming pangs of despair, are full references 
to the literary sources of his inspiration. Before depicting the 
pangs of Cupid's deadly dart and praying for its withdrawal, the 
commentary informs us that " the author hath wrought this passion 
out of Stephanus Forcatulus." Before a dire lament that Nep- 
tune's waves might be renewed from the poet's weeping eyes, 
Vulcan's forge from the flames within his breast, and the windbags 
of yEolus from his sobbing sighs, we are candidly informed that 
" the invention of this Passion is borrowed for the most part from 
Seraphine, Son. 125." A praise of his lady is imitated from 
Petrarch : a sweet fancy about the capture of Love by the Muses, 
from Ronsard : a vision of his lady in sleep from Hercules Strozza. 
Another commendation of the most rare excellencies of his mistress 
is imitated from a famous sonnet by Fiorenzuola the Florentine, 
which was imitated also by Surrey and by two other writers in 
Tottel's Miscellany. So with the majority of Watson's "passions," 
as he called his poems ; very few of them professed to be wholly 

1 He carried his disdain of commonplace into other walks of love. The ladies 
of the Court thought him a dry-as-dust because he wore no particular colours " nor 
nourished special locks of vowed hair." — Son. 54. 



SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. iS/ 

original, and the adaptation was generally very slight. Now 
Sidney revolted from this habit of adopting the praises, vows, and 
"deploring dumps" of other amorous singers. He swore "by 
blackest brook of hell," that he was " no pick-purse of another's 
wit." His eloquence came from a different source : "his Hps were 
sweet, inspired with Stella's kiss." He had tried the old plan — 

" I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe 
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain; 
Oft turning others' leaves to see if thence would flow 
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain." 

But Invention, the child of Nature, fled from the blows of 
Study. He sat biting his pen, and beating himself for spite, 
till at last — . 

" Fool ! said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write." 

His success was such that he could not refrain from boastful 
tirades against the old imitators — 

" You that do Dictionary's method bring 
Into your rhymes, running in rattling rows; 
You that poor Petrarch's long deceased woes 
With new-born sighs and denizened wit do sing, 
You take wrong ways, those far-fetched helps be such 
As do betray a want of inward touch." 

This and many other passages in Sidney illustrate the almost 
Homeric complacency of self-estimate among the Elizabethans. 

Most of the conceptions and conceits in Sidney's sonnets are 
really his own ; and they display very exquisite subtlety and 
tenderness of fancy. In these respects they deserve all the 
admiration they received from his contemporaries. What, for 
example, could be finer than the ruUng conceit of his 38th 
sonnet ? 

" This night while Sleep begins with heavy wings, 
To hatch mine eyes, and that unbitted thought 
Doth fall to stray, and my chief powers are brought 

To leave the sceptre of all subject things : 

The first that straight my fancy's error brings 
Unto my mind, is Stella's image, wrought 
By Love's own self, but, with so curious draught 

That she, methinks, not only shines but sings. 
I start, look, hark : but what in closed-up sense 

Was held, in open sense it flies away, 
Leaving me nought but wailing eloquence : 

I, seeing better sights in Sight's decay 
Called it anew, and wooed sleep again : 
But him, her host, that unkind guest had slain." 



1 88 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

The first fifty or sixty sonnets exhibit Astrophel's love in what 
may be called in fashionable mathematical language the statical 
stage : the subsequent dynamical stage being composed of sonnets 
descriptive of moods and conceits occasioned by a sequence of 
incidents between the lovers — supposed encouragement, venturous 
liberties, discouragement, despair, and so forth. During the 
statical or brooding stage, the poet-lover's mind is occupied with 
similitudes and all sorts of fanciful inventions to set forth the 
incomparable charms of his mistress and the unexampled force 
of his passion. During that period his love is subject to no 
fluctuations, no dynamic change ; it suffers neither increase nor 
abatement. It is chiefly in this stage that the soft gracefulness 
and ethereal reach of Sidney's fancy are displayed. Instead of 
the sighing lover's commonplace raw assertion that his mistress is 
fairer than Helen, or Semele, or Ariadne, or Chloris, or any other 
mythological beauty, or that she would have borne away the apple 
from Juno, Pallas, and Venus, Astrophel presents Stella with the 
following ingenious and delicately wrought conceit, enlivened by 
a sportive breath of tender humour : — 

" Phcebus was judge between Jove, Mars, and Love, 
Of those three gods whose arms the fairest were : 
Jove's golden shield did eagles sable bear, 

"Whose talons held young Ganymede above : 
But in vert field Mars bore a golden spear, 

Which through a bleeding heart his point did shove. 

Each had his crest; Mars carried Venus' glove, 
Jove on his helm the thunder-bolt did rear. 

Cupid then smiles : see ! on his crest there lies 
Stella's fair hair; her face he makes his shield, 
Whose roses gules are borne in silver field. 

Phoebus drew wide the curtains of the skies 
To blaze these last, and sware devoutly then 
The first thus match'd, were scantly gentlemen." 

He is brimful of fancies equally delicate. Venus fafls out on 
Cupid because under terror of the threats of Mars he would not 
wound that god deep enough. The angry mother breaks her son's 
bow and shafts, and the poor boy is disconsolate — 

" Till that his grandame Nature, pitying it, 
Of Stella's brows made him two better bows, 
And in her eyes of arrows infinite : 
O how for joy he leaps ! O how he crows ! 
And straight therewith, like wags new got to play, 
Falls to shrewd turns, — and I was in his way." 

The commonplace that his mistress's eyes are like stars he 
builds up into a profession of faith in Astrology. He takes 



SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 1 89 

Plato's saying, that if Virtue could come directly in contact with 
our eyes, it would raise flames of love in our souls, and maintains 
the truth of the doctrine, for Virtue has taken Stella's shape, and 
he is conscious of the effect in his own person. He exults over 
Reason, who at first intermeddled and decried, but when Stella 
appeared, knelt down and offered to produce good reasons for 
loving her. He is puzzled to make out why his plaints move her 
so faindy. He will not admit that she is hard-hearted ; but at last 
he hits upon the true explanation : — 

" I much do guess, yet find no truth, save this, 
That when the breath of my complaints doth touch 
Those dainty doors unto the court of bhss, 
The heavenly nature of that place is such 
That once come there the sobs of mine annoys 
Are metamorphosed straight to tunes of joys." 

These sweet fancies rise in the head when the heart is com- 
paratively tranquil. When storms began to agitate, the lover's 
strains became more impassioned. The following is the 48th 
sonnet : — 

" Soul's joy, bend not those morning stars from me, 
Where virtue is made strong by beauty's might ; 
Where Love is chasteness, pain doth learn delight, 

And humbleness grows on with majesty. 

Whatever may ensue, O let me be 
Copartner of the riches of that sight : 
Let not mine eyes be hell-driven from that light : 

O look ! O shine ! O let me die, and see ! 
For though I oft myself of them bemoan, 
That through my heart their beamy darts be gone, 

Whose cureless wounds, e'en now, most freshly bleed; 
Yet since my death-wound is already got, 
Dear killer, spare not thy sweet cruel shot : 

A kind of grace it is to slay with speed." 

Farther on in the series, having so far conquered the lady's 
indifference, he prays for and receives a kiss, " poor hope's first 
wealth, hostage of promised weal, breakfast of Love," and 
expresses his rapture in several most impassioned sonnets. The 
following is the 8ist : — 

" O kiss, which dost those ruddy gems impart, 

Or gems, or fruits, of new-found Paradise : 
Breathing all bliss and sweet'ning to the heart; 

Teaching dumb lips a nobler exercise ! 

O kiss, which souls, even souls, together ties 
By links of Love, and only Nature's art : 

How fain would I paint thee to all men's eyes, 
Or of thy gifts, at least, shade out some part ! 



IQO ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

But she forbids ; with blushing words she says, 

She builds her fame on higher-seated praise : 
But my heart burns, I cannot silent be. 

Then since, dear life, you fain would have me peace, 
And I, mad with delight, want wit to cease. 

Stop you my mouth with still, still kissing me." 

Sidney observes the Petrarchian form of the sonnet in so far as 
regards the division of the stanza into two staves, the first of eight 
lines with two rhymes, the second of six lines with three rhymes. 
Whether for ease or for variety, he is not particular about the 
arrangement of the rhymes within these hmits. In the first stave 
he employs sometimes the alternate, sometimes the successive 
arrangement ; and when the rhymes are alternate, he sometimes 
reverses but oftener repeats in the second quatrain the order of the 
first. In the second stave, he sometimes interweaves the lines so 
as to make a stave proper ; but oftener he subdivides it into a 
quatrain followed by a couplet. Sometimes, as in two of the 
sonnets above quoted, he begins with the couplet and ends with 
the quatrain ; and the arrangement is seemingly dictated not by 
ease or accident, but by a just sense of metrical effect. 

Interspersed with the sonnets are several songs, and in these our 
poet is happier than in the more confined measures. The last of 
these songs, which is in the form adopted by Shakespeare for the 
serenade to Silvia (Two Gent, of Ver., iv. 2), contains some very 
sweet staves. The two first lines go to the lady ; the three follow- 
ing to the lover : — 

" Who is it that this dark night 

Underneath my window plaineth? 
It is one, who from thy sight 

Being (ah !) exiled, disdaineth 
Every other vulgar light. 

Why, alas ! and are you he? 

Be not yet those fancies changed? 
Dear, when you find change in me 

Tho' from me you be estranged 
Let my change to ruin be. 

But Time will these thoughts remove : 
Time doth work what no man knoweth. 

Time doth as the subject prove, 
With time still affection groweth 

In the faithful turtle-dove. 

What if ye new beauties see 

Will not they stir new affection? 
I will think they pictures be 

Image-like of saint-perfection, 
Poorly counterfeiting thee." 



SAMUEL DANIEL. igi 

Two such songs as this and the one to Silvia make the stave 
seem the only true form for a lover's lyric : the lines run into 
music of their own accord, and scatter sweet perfumes with their 
light motion. There is nothing more ravishing in the language. 



II. — Samuel Daniel (1562-1619). 

Daniel, born near Taunton in Somersetshire, was the son of a 
music-master, but somehow obtained a university education at 
Oxford. He published a translation of Paulus Jovius's ' Discourse 
of Rare Inventions ' in 1585 at the age of twenty-three, and soon 
afterwards became tutor to Lady Anne Clifford. A man of taste 
and refined feeling, very unlike some of the sturdy contemporary 
plants who lived by acting and play-writing, Daniel grew up under 
the shelter of noble patronage, conciliating favour by the amia- 
bility of his disposition as well as by the gracefulness of his Hterary 
compliments. He enjoyed the patronage of the Earl of South- 
ampton and of the Pembroke family. Through the influence of 
his noble friends, he had obtained in 1593, the Mastership of the 
Revels, for which poor John Lyly had waited so long and begged 
so earnestly; and after the accession of James, he was made 
Gentleman-Extraordinary, and subsequently one of the Grooms 
of the Privy Chamber to the Queen Consort. His chief poetical 
works were— Sonnets to "Delia," 1592; "Delia" augmented, 
along with the "Complaint of Rosamond" and the "Tragedy of 
Cleopatra," 1594; metrical history of the "Civil Wars," 1604; 
"Tragedy of Philotas," 161 1; "Hymen's Triumph, a pastoral 
tragi-comedy," not published till 1623. He wrote several other 
pieces of less importance. His plays were produced for the 
entertainment of the Court ; and it may have been this connection 
that dictated his choice of the Wars of the Roses as a subject. 
He also wrote in prose a History of England. 

Had Daniel lived in the present day, his destiny probably 
would have been to write scholarly and elegant articles in the 
magazines, ripe fruits of leisurely study, cultivated taste, and easy 
command of polite Enghsh. His was not one of the stormy 
irregular natures that laid the foundation and raised the structure 
of the English drama: the elements of his being were softly 
blended, and wrought together mildly and harmoniously. In the 
prologue to " Hymen's Triumph," he declares that he has no rude 
antique sport to offer — 

•' But tender passions, motions soft and grave 
The still spectators must expect to have." 



192 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

He wrote for Cynthia, and therefore his play — 

" Must be gentle like to her 
Whose sweet affections mildly move and stir." 

He might have said the same about all his poetry. He was no 
master of strong passions : he never felt them, and he could not 
paint them. Between his Cleopatra and Shakespeare's there is 
a wide gulf. But he is most exquisite and delicate in pencilling 
'' tender passions, motions soft and grave." 

Without being strikingly original, Daniel has a way and a vein 
of his own. He fills his mind with ideas and forms from extra- 
neous sources, and with quietly operating plasticity reshapes them 
in accordance with the bent of his own modes of thought and 
feeling. He had not the Shakespearian lightning quickness in 
adaptation and extension ; the process in him was more peaceable 
and easy. The diction of his poems is choice ; the versification 
easy and flowing. He often puts things with felicitous terseness 
and vigour, and his words almost invariably come together happily 
and harmoniously. 

The publication of Daniel's sonnets in 1592 is an epoch in the 
history of the English Sonnet. This was the first body of sonnets 
written in what is sometimes called by pre-eminence the English 
form — three independent quatrains closed in by a couplet. 
Daniel also set an example to Shakespeare in treating the sonnet 
as a stanza, connecting several of them together as consecutive 
parts of a larger expression. Apart from their form, there is not 
very much interest in the sonnets to Delia. They have all Daniel's 
smoothness and felicity of phrase, and are pervaded by exceed- 
ingly sweet and soft sentiment. Though they rouse no strong 
feelings, they may be dwelt upon by a sympathetic reader with 
lively enjoyment. One of them, with somewhat greater depth 
of feeling than most of the others, the sonnet beginning — "Care- 
charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night," is ranked among the best 
sonnets in the language. But their most general interest is found 
in their relation to Shakespeare's sonnets, several of which seem 
to have been built up from ideas suggested by the study of those 
to Delia.^ In the following sonnets, for example, readers familiar 

iThe Sonnets to Delia on their first issue were preceded by a prose dedication 
to the Countess of Pembroke, " Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother " : the poet 
desiring " to be graced by the countenance of your protection ; whom the fortune 
of our time hath made the happy and judicial patroness of the Muses (a glory 
hereditary to your house)." To the second issue was prefixed a dedicatory sonnet 
to the same lady, entitling her as the "wonder of these, glory of other times"; 
affirming that his sonnets were " her own, begotten by her hand " ; and that though 
the travail was his, the glory must be hers. These facts, and some of the expres- 
sions, are interesting to those who believe that the friend of Shakespeare's sonnets 
was this lady's son. 



SAMUEL DANIEL. I93 

with Shakespeare's will not fail to remark a certain similarity of 
idea, although the two series of sonnets differ as widely as the 
genius of the two poets. 

Sonnet 37. 

" But love whilst that thou mayst be loved again, 

Now whilst thy May hath filled thy lap with flowers; 
Now whilst thy beauty bears without a stain : 

Now use the summer smiles, ere winter lowers : 
And whilst thou spreadst unto the rising Sun 

The fairest flower that ever saw the light, 
Now joy thy time before thy sweet be done; 

And, Delia, think thy morning must have night, 
And that thy brightness sets at length to west, 

When thou wilt close up that which now thou show'st. 
And think the same becomes thy fading best. 

Which then shall most inveil and shadow most. 
Men do not weigh the stalk for that it was, 
When once they find her flower, her glory pass." 



Sonnet 39. 

" W^hen winter snows upon thy sable hairs, 

And frost of age hath nipt thy beauties near; 
When dark shall seem thy day that never clears. 

And all lies withered that was held so dear : 
Then take this picture which I here present thee, 

Limned with a pencil that's not all unworthy : 
Here see the gifts that God and Nature lent thee; 

Here read thyself, and what I suffer'd for thee. 
This may remain thy lasting monument, 

Which happily posterity may cherish; 
These colours with thy fading are not spent, 

These may remain, when thou and I shall perish. 
If they remain, then thou shalt live thereby : 
They will remain, and so thou canst not die." 

Sonnet 41. 

" Be not displeased that these my papers should 

Bewray unto the world how fair thou art ; 
Or that my wits have showed the best they could 

The chastest flame that ever warmed heart ! 
Think not, sweet Delia, this shall be thy shame, 

My Muse should sound thy praise with mournful warble ; 
How many live, the glory of whose name 

Shall rest in ice, when thine is graved in marble ! 
Thou mayst in after-ages live esteemed 

Unburied in these lines, reserved in pureness ; 
These shall entomb those eyes, that have redeemed 

Me from the vulgar, thee from all obscureness. 
Although my careful accents never moved thee, 
Yet count it no disgrace that I have loved thee." 



194 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

Sonnet 52. 

" Let others sing of knights and paladins, 

In aged accents and untimely words ; 
Paint shadows in imaginary lines 

Which well the reach of their high wits records; 
But I must sing of thee, and those fair eyes 

Authentic shall my verse in lime to come 
When yet th' unborn shall say, * Lo where she lies 

Whose beauty made him speak, that else was dumb.' 
These are the arks, the trophies I erect, 

That fortify thy name against old age; 
And these thy sacred virtues must protect, 

Against the dark and Time's consuming rage. 
Though th' error of my youth in them appear 

Suffice they show I lived and loved thee dear." 

Daniel's genius is best shown in the expression of bereaved 
love in the " Complaint of Rosamond," and in " Hymen's Tri- 
umph " — as Spenser said, " in tragic plaints and passionate mis- 
chance." In the expression of courtship love, his imagination is 
cold and acts artificially and mechanically : but when the beloved 
object is taken away, he is moved to the depths, and pours forth 
his strains with genuine warmth. The passion has still a certain 
softness in it : his lovers have not the inconsolable fierce distrac- 
tion of Shakespeare's forsaken lover, " tearing of papers, break- 
ing rings atwain : " they do not shriek undistinguished woe : 
but they sigh deeply, and their voices are richly laden with im- 
passioned remembrance. The plaintive sorrow of Thyrsis is sweet 
and profound. But nothing that Daniel has written flows with 
surer instinct and more natural impulse than the agonised endear- 
ments of Harry over the body of Rosamond. Wholly different 
in character from the frantic doting of Venus over her lost Adon, 
these verses are hardly less perfect as the utterance of a milder 
and less fiercely fond passion. The deep heart's sorrow of the 
bereaved lover makes itself felt in every line — 

*' Then as these passions do him overwhelm 
He draws him near my body to behold it; 
And as the vine married unto the elm 
With strict embraces, so doth he enfold it : 
And as he in his careful arms doth hold it 
Viewing the face that even death commends 
On senseless lips millions of kisses spends. 

' Pitiful mouth,' said he, * that living gavest 
The sweetest comfort that my soul could wish : 
O be it lawful now, that dead thou ha vest, 
This sorrowing farewell of a dying kiss. 
And you, fair eyes, containers of my bliss, 
Motives of love, born to be matched never, 
Entomb'd in your sweet circles, sleep for ever. 



HENRY CONSTABLE. I95 

'Ah, how methinks I see Death dallying seeks 
To entertain itself in Love's sweet place ! 
Decayed roses of discoloured cheeks, 
Do yet retain dear notes of former grace, 
And ugly Death sits fair within her face; 
Sweet remnants resting of vermilion red. 
That Death itself doubts whether she be dead. 

' Wonder of beauty, O receive these plaints, 
These obsequies, the last that I shall make thee : 
For lo, my soul that now already faints, 
(That loved the living, dead will not forsake thee) 
Hastens her speedy course to overtake thee. 
I'll meet my death, and free myself thereby. 
For ah, what can he do that cannot die? 

* Yet, ere I die, thus much my soul doth vow, 
Revenge shall sweeten death with ease of mind : 
And I will cause posterity shall know. 
How fair thou wert above all womankind. 
And after-ages monuments shall find 
Showing thy beauty's title, not thy name, 
Rose of the world that sweetened so the same.' " 



III. — Henry Constable (i555?-i6io?). 

Constable was of Roman Catholic family, and was educated at 
St John's, Cambridge, where he took the degree of B.A. in 1579. 
He was obliged to leave England in 1595, from suspicion of trea- 
sonable practices. Venturing back in 1601 or 1602, he was com- 
mitted to the Tower, from which he was not released till towards 
the close of 1604. He is mentioned as if he were still alive in the 
'Return from Parnassus ' (1606), and in Bolton's ' Hypercritica ' 
(1616) as if he were then dead. The first edition of his sonnets 
to "Diana" appeared in 1592, and contained 23; a second was 
issued in 1594, containing 27. Sixty- three sonnets by Constable, 
methodically arranged in sevens, are printed in the Harleian Mis- 
cellany from a MS. known as Todd's MS. : this collection comprises 
all that appear in the printed collections. Constable wrote also 
certain ' Spiritual Sonnets,' and a version of the tale of Venus 
and Adonis, which was not pubhshed till 1600, but is believed to 
have been written earlier. 

Like Daniel, Constable does not attempt the delineation of 
stormy passions, yet his deepest vein is quite different from 
Daniel's. He has a more ardent soul than Daniel : his imagi- 
nation is more warmly and richly coloured : he has more of flame 
and less of moisture in him. Daniel's words flow most abundantly 
and with happiest impulse when his eye is dim with tears ; Con- 
stable's when his whole being is aglow with the rapture of beauty. 
Tears fall from the poet's eyes in the following sonnet, but they 



ig6 



ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 



fall like rain in sunshine. The occasion is his lady's walking in 
a garden : — 

" My lady's presence makes the roses red 

Because to see her lips they blush for shame : 

The lily's leaves for envy pale became, 
And her white hands in them this envy bred. 
The marigold abroad its leaves did spread 

Because the sun's and her power is the same; 

The violet of purple colour came, 
Dyed with the blood she made my heart to shed. 

In brief, all flowers from her their virtue take; 
From her sweet breath their sweet smells do proceed; 

The living heat which her eyebeams do make 
Warmeth the ground, and quickeneth the seed. 

The rain wherewith she watereth these flowers 

Falls from mine eyes which she dissolves in showers." 

The following is more characteristic of his soaring ardour — 
" rapture all air and fire ; " though the structure is somewhat 
artificial : — 

" Blame not my heart for flying up so high, 

Sith thou art cause that it this flight begun, 

For earthly vapours, drawn up by the sun, 
Comets become, and night-suns in the sky. 
My humble heart so with thy heavenly eye 

Drawn up aloft, all low desires doth shun : 

Raise thou me up, as thou my heart has done, 
So during night, in heaven remain may I. 
* Blame not, I say again, my high desire, 
Sith of us both the cause thereof depends : 

In thee doth shine, in me doth burn a fire; 
Fire draweth up others, and itself ascends. 

Thine eye a fire, and so draws up my love; 

My love a fire, and so ascends above." 

The most exquisite of his sonnets for sweet colour and winning 
fancy is that where he compares his love to a beggar at the door 
of beauty — 

" Pity refusing my poor Love to feed, 

A beggar starved for want of help he lies. 

And at your mouth, the door of beauty, cries 
That thence some alms of sweet grants may proceed. 
But as he waiteth for some almes-deed, 

A cherry tree before the door he spies — 

O dear, quoth he, two cherries may suffice, 
Two only life may save in this my need. 

But beggars can they nought but cherries eat? 
Pardon my Love, he is a goddess' son, 

And never feedeth but of dainty meat, 
Else need he not to pine as he hath done. 

For only the sweet fruit of this sweet tree 

Can give food to my love, and life to me." 



THOMAS LODGE. I97 

In one of his sonnets he makes the same glorious claim for his 
lady that Shakespeare makes for the fair youth of his adoration — 

" Miracle of the world! I never will deny 

That former poets praise the beauty of their day; 
But all those beauties were but figures of thy praise, 
And all those poets did of thee but prophesy." 

His amorous sonnets and other light poems were the effusions 
of his youth, and like Spenser he turned in his older years to the 
contemplation of heavenly beauty. He concludes his love-sonnets 
by saying — 

" For if none ever loved like me, then why 

Still blameth he the things he doth not know? 
And he that hath so loved will favour show, 
For he hath been a fool as well as I." 

And adds in prose — " When I had ended this last sonnet, and 
found that such vain poems as I had by idle hours writ, did 
amount just to the climacterical number 63 ; methought it was 
high time for my folly to die, and to employ the remnant of wit to 
other calmer thoughts less sweet and less bitter." There can be 
little doubt that the beautiful "spiritual sonnets" ascribed to him 
by Mr Park, and printed in vol. ii. of the ' HeHconia,' are his com- 
position. Those addressed to " our Blessed Lady " are particu- 
larly fine, 

IV. — Thomas Lodge (1556-1625). 

Lodge, the next in order of our sonneteers, led rather a varied 
life. His father was a grocer in London, who in 1563 attained to 
the dignity of Lord Mayor. He entered Trinity College, Oxford, 
in 1573, and Lincoln's Inn in 1578; but hterature seems to have 
had more attraction for him than the bar. In 1586, and again in 
1 59 1-3, we find him engaged in privateering expeditions to the 
West Indies, in search of excitement and adventure. He belonged 
to the wild society of Greene, Marlowe, and Nash ; but if he took 
much part in their dissipations, he had strength enough to sur- 
vive it, and when the leaders of the set died off, he became sober 
and respectable, studied medicine, gave up poetry, and spent 
the leisure of his professional life in translating Josephus, and the 
'' works, both natural and moral," of Seneca. His chief pro- 
ductions were — A ' Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage-plays,' 
in reply to Stephen Gosson's 'School of Abuse,' 1580; 'Alarm 
against Usurers,' along with the novelette of ' Forbonius and 
Prisceria,' 1584; ' Scylla's Metamorphosis,' with "sundry most 
absolute Poems and Sonnets," 1589; ' Euphues Golden Legacy,' 



198 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

(reprinted in Mr Collier's ' Shakespeare's Library/ as being the 
basis of " As Yoii Like It," 1590 y' Phyllis honoured with Pastoral 
Sonnets/ 1593; 'The Wounds of Civil War/ a tragedy on the 
history of Marius and Sylla, 1594; 'A Fig for Momus/ a body 
of satires, 1595 ; 'Wit's Misery and the World's Madness,' a prose 
satire, 1596; 'A Marguerite of America,' a very tragical novel, 
1596. 

Lodge's love-poems have an exquisite delicacy and grace : they 
breathe a tenderer and truer passion than we find in any of his 
contemporaries. His sonnets are more loose and straggling, 
slighter and less compactly built, than Constable's or Daniel's ; 
but they have a wonderful charm of sweet fancy and unaffected 
tenderness. His themes are the usual praises of beauty and 
complaints of unkindness ; but he contrives to impart to them 
a most unusual air of sincere devotion and graceful fervour. None 
of his rivals can equal the direct and earnest simplicity and grace 
of his adoration of Phyllis, and avowal of faith in her constancy. 

" Fair art thou, Phyllis; ay, so fair, sweet maid, 
As nor the sun nor I have seen more fair; 
For in thy cheeks sweet roses are embayed 

And gold more pure than gold doth gild thy hair. 
"—'Sweet bees have hived their honey on thy tongue,- — •"''' 

And Hebe spiced her nectar with thy breath: 
, About thy neck do all the graces throng 
•C"^ And lay such baits as might entangle Death. 
In such a breast what heart would not be thrall? 

From such sweet arms who would not wish embraces? 
At thy fair hands who wonders not at all, 

Wonder itself through ignorance embases. 
Yet natheless tho' wondrous gifts you call these, 
My faith is far more wonderful than all these." 

There is a seeming artlessness in Lodge's sonnets, a winning 
directness, that constitutes a great part of their charm. They 
seem to be uttered through a clear and pure medium straight 
from the heart : their tender fragrance and music come from the 
heart itself. If the poet's design was to assume a pastoral 
innocence and simplicity, he has eminently succeeded. There 
are many conceits in his sonnets, but they are expressed so simply 
and naturally that they take on the semblance of half-earnest 
beliefs. A simple silly Arcadian may be allowed the sweet fancy 
of supposing a storm to be the result of Aurora's envy and despair 
at seeing his lovely mistress. 

" The dewy roseate Morn had with her hairs 
In sundry sorts the Indian clime adorned; 
And now her eyes apparelled in tears 

The loss of lovely Memnon long had mourned : 



THOMAS LODGE. I99 

Whenas she spied the nymph whom I admire, 

Kembing her locks, of which the yellow gold 
Made blush the beauties of her curled wire, 

Which heaven itself with wonder might behold : 
Then red with shame, her reverend locks she rent, 

And weeping hid the beauty of her face — 
The flower of fancy wrought such discontent : 

The sighs which 'midst the air she breathed a space 
A three days' stormy tempest did maintain. 
Her shame a fire, her eyes a swelling rain." 

And when despair seizes him, with what earnestness he makes his 
appeal to the last relief ! — 

^ " Burst, burst, poor heart, thou hast no longer hope : 

j Captive mine eyes unto eternal sleep; 

T Let all my senses have no further scope; 

A Let death be lord of me and all my sheep. 

j For Phyllis hath betrothed fierce disdain, 

,«-> That makes his mortal mansion in her heart; 

And tho' my tongue have long time taken pain, 

To sue divorce and wed her to desart, 
She will not yield; my words can have no power; 
She scorns my faith; she laughs at my sad lays; 
She fills my soul with never-ceasing sour. 

Who filled the world with volumes of her praise. 
In such extremes what wretch can cease to crave 
His peace from Death who can no mercy have? " 

It may, however, be acknowledged that Lodge's nature was not 
specially fitted for the sonnet form of composition ; he was not 
sufficiently patient and meditative to elaborate intricate stanzas. 
His lines have on them the dewy freshness of an impulsive gush, 
— a freshness off which the dew has not been brushed by the 
travail of thought ; and the opening of his sonnets in many cases 
leads us to expect better things than we find as we proceed when 
the leading idea has been hammered out into a uatorzain. In 
the sonnet that opens with the fines — 



"Ah, pale and dying infant of the spring, 
How rightly now do I resemble thee ! 
That self-same hand that thee from stalk did wring, 

Hath rent my breast and robbed my heart from me " — 

the conclusion is laboured and disappointing. And still more 
disappointing is the sonnet to his lady on her sickness, which 
opens with the exquisitely tender verses — 

" How languisheth the primrose of love's garden? 
How trill her tears the elixir of my senses? " 

Although it contains two other beautiful fines of adjuration — 

" Ah, roses, love's fair roses, do not languish : 
Blush through the milk-white veil that holds you covered." 



200 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

Mixed with his sonnets to Phyllis, and scattered through his 
prose tales are many lyrics of less intricate measure, which show 
Lodge's charm at the height of its power. Take, for example, the 
two following in honour of Phyllis : — 

" Love guards the roses of thy lips, 

And flies about them like a bee; 
If I approach, he forward skips. 

And if I kiss, he stingeth me. 
Love in thine eyes doth build his bower, 

And sleeps within their pretty shine; 
And if I look the boy will lower. 

And from their orbs shoot shafts divine. 
Love works thy heart within his fire 

And in my tears doth firm the same; 
And if I tempt, it will retire. 

And of my plaints doth make a game. 
Love, let me cull her choicest flowers, 

And pity me, and calm her eye; 
Make soft her heart, dissolve her lowers, 

Then will I praise thy deity. 
But if thou do not, Love, I'll truly serve her, 
In spite of thee, and by firm faith deserve her. 

My Phyllis hath the morning sun. 

At first to look upon her, 
And Phyllis hath morn-waking birds 

Her rising for to honour. 
My Phyllis hath prime feathered flowers 

That smile when she treads on them, 
And Phyllis hath a gallant flock 

That leaps since she doth own them. 
But Phyllis hath so hard a heart, 

Alas that she should have it ! 
As yields no mercy to desart 

Nor grace to those that crave it. 
Sweet sun, when thou lookest on, 

Pray her regard my moan. 
Sweet birds, when you sing to her. 

To yield some pity woo her. 
Sweet flowers, whenas she treads on, 
Tell her her beauty deads one. 
And if in life her love she nill agree me, 
Pray her before I die she'll come and see me." 

Not less exquisite is Rosalind's Madrigal : — 

" Love in my bosom like a bee 

Doth suck his sweet : 
Now with his wings he plays with me, 

Now with his feet. 
Within mine eyes he makes his nest. 
His bed amid my tender breast, 
My kisses are his daily feast. 
And yet he robs me of my rest. 

Ah J wanton, will ye? 



THOMAS LODGE. 201 

And if I sleep then percheth he 

With pretty flight, 
And makes his pillow of my knee 

The livelong night. 
Strike I my lute, he tunes the string, 
He music plays if so I sing, 
He lends me every lovely thing: 
Yet cruel he my heart doth sting, 

Whist, wanton, still ye, 

Else I with roses every day 

Will whip you hence; 
And bind you when you long to play 

For your offence. 
I'll shut mine eyes to keep you in, 
I'll make you fast it for your sin, 
I'll count your power not vi^orth a pin, 
Alas ! what hereby shall I win, 

If he gainsay me? 

What if I beat the wanton boy 

With many a rod? 
He will repay me with annoy. 

Because a god. 
Then sit thou safely on my knee 
And let thy bower my bosom be : 
Lurk in mine eyes, I like of thee : 
O Cupid, so thou pity me. 

Spare not but play thee." 

" Scylla's Metamorphosis," the tale of Glaucus and Scylla, is in- 
teresting on its own account, and further, as the probable model 
of Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," whose unhappy loves it 
introduces as an episode. It is at least the first published of the 
apocryphal classical tales which at that time became a transient 
fashion — the English anticipator, if not the model, of Marlowe's 
'' Hero and Leander," Drayton's " Endymion and Phoebe," and 
Chapman's " Ovid's Banquet of Sense." I need not follow the 
windings of the tale. The gist is that Scylla was metamorphosed 
as a punishment for her cruelty to Glaucus, a sea-god : and the 
interest of the poem lies in its voluptuous descriptions. I may 
quote his picture of the anguish of Venus for comparison with 
Daniel's Henry and Shakespeare's Venus : it is more a pretty 
grief than a deep passion : its sweetness reminds us of a child's 
endearments to a dead pet bird. 

" He that hath seen the sweet Arcadian boy 
Wiping the purple from his forced wound. 
His pretty tears betokening his annoy; 

His sighs, his cries, his falling on the ground; 
The echoes ringing from the rocks his fall, 
The trees with tears reporting of his thrall. 



202 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

And Venus starting at her love-mate's cry 

Forcing her birds to haste her chariot on; 
And, full of grief, at last, with piteous eye, 

Seen where all pale with death he lay alone 
Whose beauty quail'd as wont the lilies droop 
When wasteful winter winds do make them stoop. 

Her dainty hand addressed to claw her dear, 

Her roseal lip allied to his pale cheek, 
Her sighs, and then her looks and heavy cheer, 

Her bitter threats, and then her passions meek; 
How on his senseless corpse she lay a-crying, 
As if the boy were then but new a-dying." 

Lodge's " Fig for Momus " is often amusing, but the satire is 
not very pungent. He was much too good-natured a man to be a 
satirist : he was not capable even of smiling spite, much less of 
bitter derision. His " Epistles " are entitled to the claim that he 
makes for them, of being the first productions of the kind in 
English, and their date disposes at once of Joseph Hall's conceited 
boast — 

" I first adventure, follow me who list 
And be the second English satirist." 

But priority is their chief merit : they are rf:olourless imitations of 
Horace. Marston is the first real English satirist. 

Nor can Lodge be said to have been successful as a dramatist. 
The " Wounds of Civil War " is a heavy drama. Sylla is drawn 
with considerable power as a bold rough man with a certain sense 
of humour in him : ambitious, boastful, treating his enemies with 
scoffing contempt, making a jest of death and cruelty, rudely 
repelling compliments, provoking public censure for the pleasure 
of defying it. He may have supplied some raw material for 
Shakespeare's " Coriolanus." Sylla talks very much in the vein 
of Tamburlaine ; and it is probable from this that Lodge may 
fairly get the credit or discredit of the extravagant ramps of Rasni 
in the " Looking-glass for London," which he wrote in conjunc- 
tion with Greene. It is a curious thing that men like Lodge and 
Peele should quite equal, if not surpass, even Marlowe in outra- 
geous heroics. One wonders that the Herod of the Mysteries 
should be out-Heroded by one who dwells with such fresh enthu- 
siasm on tender beauties. How different are Sylla's rants from 
this strain ! — 

" O shady vale, O fair enriched meads, 

O sacred woods, sweet fields, and rising mountains; 
O painted flowers, green herbs where Flora treads, 
Refreshed by wanton winds and watery fountains." 

Perhaps, however, it is not more surprising than that the author 
of "Tamburlaine " should be the author of " Hero and Leander." 



THOMAS WATSON. . 203 

V. — Thomas Watson (1557?- 1592?). 

We have mentioned incidently the ' 'EKarofXTraOta, or Passionate 
Century of Love,' by Thomas Watson. Watson first appeared as 
an author in 158 1, with a translation into Latin of the 'Antigone ' 
of Sophocles. The " Passionate Century " (that is, Himdred) was 
pubhshed in 1582. Three years after, he executed a Latin elegiac 
poem, entitled "Amyntas." He continued the practice of Latin 
verse alongside of English: in 1590 he published an " Eglogue 
upon the Death of Sir Francis Walsingham " in Latin and EngHsh, 
adopting in this case the title of " Mehboeus." In 1593, in which 
year he was mentioned as if then dead/ his last work was pub- 
lished — a collection of sixty sonnets, entitled "The Tears of 
Fancy, or Love Disdained." 

Neither the "Century of Love " nor the "Tears of Fancy" be- 
longs to a high order of Poetry. The " Century " was avowedly 
an exercise of skill : the love-passion, he tells us in the Preface, 
was "but supposed." With this the critic has no quarrel: so 
far Watson differs from many of his poetical brethren, only in the 
perhaps superfluous candour of the avowal. The misfortune is 
that the supposition, the imaginative passion, is weak. There is 
no constructive vitality in his lines ; the words and images seem 
brought together by a process of mechanical accumulation. The 
"Tears of Fancy " are decidedly superior to the " Love-passions," 
but here also there is a fatal lack of spontaneity and freshness : 
the superiority has every appearance of being due to the author's 
study of Spenser. 

The " Passionate Century " is worth reading as a repertory of 
commonplace lover's hyperboles. There never was so sweet a 
lady, never so fond nor so distraught a lover. Hand, foot, lip, 
eye, brow, and golden locks are all incomparable. The ages never 
have produced, and never will produce, such another; Apelles 
could not have painted her, Praxiteles could not have sculptured 
her, Virgil and Homer could not have expressed her, and Tully 
would not have ventured to repeat the number of her gifts. She 
is superior to all the mythological paramours of Jove. The various 
goddesses have contributed their best endowments, mental and 
physical, to make her perfect. Her voice excels Arion's harp, 
Pliilomela's song, Apollo's lute ; yea — 

" Music herself and all the Muses nine 
For skill or voice their titles may resign." 

The despair produced in the lover's heart by the disdain of such 
a paragon is in a corresponding ratio. Vesuvius is nothing to 

1 See the introduction to Mr Arber's reprint. 



204 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

the fire that consumes his heart. The pains of hell would be a 
comparative relief. He suffers the combined tortures of Tantalus, 
Ixion, Tityus, and Sisyphus : — 

*' If Tityus, wretched wight, beheld my pains, 

He would confess his wounds to be but small : 

A vulture worse than his tears all my veins, 
Yet never lets me die, nor live at all, 

Would God a while I might possess his place, 
To judge of both which were in better case." 

The " Tears of Fancy," which, as we have said, are chiefly imi- 
tation gems, observe the same form as Daniel's. The two follow- 
ing quatrains, with their pretty anadiplosis, or doubling in one 
line upon the last words of the preceding, are an extreme example 
of the poet's imitation of Spenser. Cupid is the eager fugitive, 
bent on mischief : — 

"Then on the sudden fast away he fled, 

He fled apace as from pursuing foe : 
Ne ever looked he back, ne turned his head. 

Until he came whereas he wrought my woe. 
Tho' casting from his back his bended bow, 

He quickly clad himself in strange disguise : 
In strange disguise that no man might him know, 

So coucht himself within my Lady's eyes." 

The two following conceits are in his best manner, and derive 
a certain interest from their having apparently been imitated in 
Shakespeare's sonnets 46 and 47 : — 

" My heart imposed this penance on mine eyes, 

Eyes the first causers of my heart's lamenting : 
That they should weep till love and fancy dies. 

Fond love the last cause of my heart's repenting. 
Mine eyes upon my heart inflict this pain, 

Bold heart that dared to harbour thoughts of love ! 
That it should love and purchase fell disdain, 

A grievous penance, which my heart doth prove. 
Mine eyes did weep as heart had then imposed, 

My heart did pine as eyes had it constrained: 
Eyes in their tears my paled face disclosed, 

Heart in his sighs did show it was disdained. 
So th' one did weep, th' other sigh'd, both grieved, 
For both must live and love, both unrelieved." 

" My heart accused mine eyes and was offended, 

Vowing the cause was in mine eyes' aspiring: 
Mine eyes affirmed my heart might well amend it, 

If he at first had banished love's desiring. 
Heart said that love did enter at the eyes. 

And from the eyes descended to the heart : 
Eyes said that in the heart did sparks arise, 

Which kindled flame that wrought the inward smart. 



MICHAEL DRAYTON. 205 

Heart said eyes' tears might soon have quench'd that flame, 
Eyes said heart's sighs at tirst might love excite. 

So heart the eyes, and eyes the heart did blame, 
Whilst both did pine, for both the pain did feel. 

Heart sighed and bled, eyes wept and gazed too much : 

Yet must I gaze because I see none such." 

These sonnets, with or without the following beginning of Wat- 
son's 2 2d Love-passion — 

" When wert thou born, sweet Love? who was thy sire? 

When Flora first adorn'd Dame Tellus' lap, 
Then sprung I forth with wanton Hot Desire. 

Who was thy nurse, to feed thee first with pap? 
Youth first with tender hand bound up my liead. 
Then said, with looks alone I should be fed " 

may have suggested the song in the ' Merchant of Venice,' Act 
iii. 2, "Tell me, where is Fancy bred." ^ 

VI. — Michael Drayton (1563-1631). 

In Spenser's " Colin Clout's Come Home Again," published in 
1595, occur four lines that are commonly supposed to refer to 
Shakespeare — 

"And there though last not least is Aetion; 
A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found : 
Whose muse, full of high thought's invention, 
Doth like himself heroically sound." 

A much stronger probability may be made out for Drayton. 
Drayton made his debut as a pastoral poet in 1593, with his 
'' Idea : Shepherd's Garland, fashioned in Nine Eclogues ; " and 
followed this up in 1594 with a body of sonnets — " Idea's Mirror, 
Amours in Quatorzains " — and the mythological tale of " Endy- 
mion and Phoebe." It has been considered conclusive against 
the probability of his being referred to by Spenser that '' he had 
published nothing in an heroical strain even in 1595 ; " and that 
" it would be difficult to assign any meaning to the assertion that 
his name did, like himself, heroically sound." But Drayton's first 
publication, 'Harmony of the Church,' 1591, versified the highest 
poetry of the Old Testament, and loftily disclaimed all intention 
of '' feeding any vain humour ;" while the poetical name that 
he assumed was Rowland or Roland, the most heroic name in 
chivalry. Spenser, full as he was of Ariosto, was much more 

1 A writer in the ' Quarterly Review,' No. 267, ascribes the suggestion of this 
song to a sonnet by Jacopo da Lentino. The sonnet is not known to have been 
printed before 1661, but the writer supposes Shakespeare to have seen it in MS., 
and considers it a proof that Shakespeare could read Italian, if not that he had 
been in Italy ! The coincidence is certainly striking, but the birthplace of Love 
or Fancy in the eyes was a commonplace. I have remarked several English 
poems of the time quite capable of having given the suggestion. 



206 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

likely to be struck with the heroic sound of Roland than of 
Shakespeare. Further, the aspiring character of Drayton's muse 
would seem to have struck other minds than Spenser's. Prefixed 
to " Endymion and Phoebe " is a commendatory poem containing 
the following lines : — 

" Rowland, when first I read thy stately rhymes 
In shepherd's weeds when yet thou livedst unknown, 

I then beheld thy chaste Idea's fame 
Put on the wings of thy immortal style. 

Thy fiery spirit mounts up to the sky, 
And what thou writest lives to Eternity." 

Drayton did more afterwards to show the loftiness or heroism 
of his thoughts. His chief productions were — " Mortimeriados " 
(a poem on the civil wars in the reign of Edward II., recast and 
pubhshed in 1603 under the title of the "Barons' Wars"), 1596 ; 
" England's Heroical Epistles " (imaginary letters after the manner 
of Ovid between lovers celebrated in EngHsh history), 1598; 
" Polyolbion " (a metrical description of England, county by 
county), eighteen books in 1612, thirty complete in 1622 ; "The 
Battle of Agincourt," 1627. 

Not much is known of his personal history. He was born at 
Hartshill, Atherston, Warwickshire, near the river Anker. In 
one of his poems he speaks of himself as having been a " proper 
goodly page." His relations with patrons and patronesses are 
known only from his dedications, which are addressed to various 
honourable and noble personages. In the course of his numer- 
ous publications, he fell out lamentably with the booksellers : 
in a letter to Drummond, he calls them " a company of base 
knaves, whom I both scorn and kick at." In person, he was a 
swart little man, full of energy and an enthusiastic sense of his 
own powers ; erudite, laborious, versatile ; noted for the respecta- 
bility of his life, and distinguished by the ardour of his orthodox 
and patriotic sentiments. I doubt whether he had any special 
call to poetry beyond the contagion of circumstances ; ambition 
made his verses. No person with literary gifts could have lived 
in such an atmosphere without catching something of the poetic 
frenzy : one could hardly have helped learning how to express the 
fiery touch of love, and the sweet influences of nature. Drayton 
has a suspicious pride in the exercise of his gift : originality and 
versatility are the two qualities that he boasts of, as if he had 
overmastered the muse by intellectual force rather than won her 
by natural affinity. Yet he has written some interesting poetry : 
his " Nymphidia " is a pretty burlesque of love, jealousy, combat, 



MICHAEL DRAYTON. 20/ 

and reconciliation at the Court of Faeryland ; his " Polyolbion," a 
miracle of industry and sustained enthusiasm, contains some fine 
descriptions ; one, at least, of his sonnets (that quoted in Mr Pal- 
grave's ' Golden Treasury ') is exceedingly happy and ingenious ; 
and his poem on the Battle of Agincourt is vivid, stirring, and filled 
throughout with the most glowing patriotism. His ode on the 
Battle of Agincourt is, perhaps, his masterpiece : Mr Swinburne 
ranks it with Campbell's " Battle of the Baltic," of which it seems 
to have been the model. 

" Fair stood the wind for France, 
When we our sails advance, 
Nor now to prove our chance 

Longer not tarry, 
But put into the main : 
At Kaux the mouth of Seine 
With all his warlike train 

Landed King Harry. 

And taking many a fort 
Furnish'd in warlike sort 
Coming toward Agincourt 

In happy hour; 
Skirmishing day by day 
With those oppose his way 
Whereas the general lay 

With all his power. 

And ready to be gone. 
Armour on armour shone, 
Drum unto drum did groan, 

To hear was wonder; 
That with the cries they make 
The very earth did shake; 
Trumpet to trumpet spake, 

Thunder to thunder. 

Well it thine age became, 
O noble Erpingham ! 
That didst the signal frame 

Unto the forces; 
When from a meadow by, 
Like a storm suddenly, 
The English archery 

Stuck the French horses. 

When down their bows they threw, 
And forth their bilboes drew, 
And on the French they flew. 

No man was tardy. 
Arms from the shoulder sent; 
Scalps to the teeth were rent; 
Down the French peasants went : 

These were men hardy. 



208 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 



On happy Crispin day 
Fought was the noble fray, 
Which Fame did not delay 

To England to carry. 
O when shall Englishmen 
With such acts fill a pen, 
Or England breed again 

Such a King Harry ! " 

There is something of the same fire in his poem on the same 
glorious battle, though it is weighted and obscured by the laborious 
circumstantiality, the industrious particularisation, which is so con- 
spicuous also in his " Polyolbion." He names the various ships, 
and describes the colours and ensigns of the various companies, 
with Homeric minuteness and more than Homeric ardour : and 
realises such scenes as the two camps on the night before the 
battle with great variety of vivid details. His circumstantiality 
sometimes has the powerful effect so often remarked in the descrip- 
tions of Defoe : for example, the following incidents in the siege 
of Harfleur : — 

"Now upon one side you should hear a cry 

And all that quarter clouded with a smother; 

The like from that against it by and by, 
As though the one were echo to the other. 

The king and Clarence so their turns can ply; 
And valiant Glo'ster shows himself their brother, 

Whose mines to the besieged more mischief do, 

Than with the assaults above, the other two. 

An old man sitting by the fireside 

Decrepit with extremity of age. 
Stilling his little grandchild when it cried, 

Almost distracted with the batteries' rage; 
Sometimes doth speak it fair, sometimes doth chide : 

As thus he seeks its mourning to assuage. 
By chance a bullet doth the chimney hit, 
Which falling in doth kill both him and it. 

Whilst the sad weeping mother sits her down, 

To give her little new-born babe the pap, 
A luckless quarry, levelled at the town. 

Kills the sweet baby sleeping in her lap, 
That with the fright she falls into a swoon; 

From which awaked, and mad with the mishap, 
As up a rampier shrieking she doth climb, 
Comes a great shot, and strikes her limb from limb. 

Whilst a sort run confusedly to quench 

Some palace burning, or some fired street. 
Called from where they were fighting in the trench, 

They in their way with balls of wildfire meet, 



MICHAEL DRAYTON. 2O9 

So plagued are the miserable French, 
Not above head but also under feet; 
For the fierce English vow the town to take, 
Or of it soon a heap of stones to make. 

Hot is the siege, the English coming on 

As men so long to be kept out that scorn, 
Careless of wounds, as they were made of stone. 

As with their teeth the walls they would have torn : 
Into a breach who quickly is not gone. 

Is by the next behind him overborne; 
So that they found a place that gave them way. 
They never cared what danger therein lay." 

If his sonnets have no great intrinsic interest, they derive a 
certain adventitious interest from their illustrative bearing on the 
sonnets of Shakespeare. The following, with its curious points of 
resemblance to Shakespeare's 144th sonnet — "Two loves I have 
of comfort and despair " — raises a doubt whether that perplexing 
sonnet is not more figurative than is commonly supposed. If I 
am right in my recollection that it did not appear before the 
edition of 1602, it may have been imitated from Shakespeare's, 
which appeared in 1599; and at any rate, taken in connection 
with the last lines of Shakespeare's sonnet, it raises the question 
whether Shakespeare's worser spirit was so serious an evil as the 
first part of the sonnet represents. 

" An evil spirit your beauty haunts me still. 

Wherewith, alas ! I have been long possesst, 
Which ceaseth not to tempt me to each ill, 

Nor gives me once but one poor minute's rest : 
In me it speaks whether I sleep or wake, 

And when by means to drive it out I try, 
With greater torments then it me doth take. 

And tortures me in most extremity : 
Before my face it lays down my despairs 

And hastes me on unto a sudden death; 
Now tempting me to drown myself in tears 

And then in sighing to give up my breath : 
Thus am I still provoked to every evil 
By this good wicked spirit, sweet angel devil." 

In Drayton's sonnets we find several of the conceits that appear 
in Shakespeare's, such as the warfare between heart and eyes and 
the play upon the identity of the lover and his beloved ; but it 
may perhaps be more serviceable to quote his version of another 
commonplace, the promise of immortality to his mistress, to help 
to correct a vulgar notion that Shakespeare stood alone in the 
lofty confidence of eternal memory. 

" How many paltry, foolish, painted things, 
That now in coaches trouble every street. 
Shall be forgotten, whom no poet sings, 
Ere they be well wrapped in their winding-sheet ! 



210 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

Where I to thee eternity shall give, 

When nothing else remaineth of these days, 
And queens hereafter shall be glad to live 

Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise; 
Virgins and matrons reading these my rhymes, 

Shall be so much delighted with thy story, 
That they shall grieve they lived not in these times 

To have seen thee, their sex's only glory : 
So shalt thou fly above the vulgar throng 
Still to survive in my immortal song." 

" Stay, speedy Time, behold before thou pass, 

From age to age, what thou hast sought to see, 
One in whom all the excellencies be; 
In whom Heaven looks itself as in a glass : 
Time, look thou too in this tralucent glass 
And thy youth past in this pure mirror see. 
As the world's beauty in his infancy. 
What it was then, and thou before it was; 
Pass on, and to posterity tell this; 

Yet see thou tell but truly what hath been : 
Say to our nephews, that thou once hast seen 
In perfect human shape, all heavenly bliss : 
And bid them mourn, nay more, despair with thee 
When she is gone, her like again to see." 



VII. ^- William Shakespeare — Sonnets. 

After a survey of the huge issue of sonnets between 1591 and 
1594, the characteristics of the sonnets of Shakespeare seem to 
stand out with greater distinctness. They divide themselves into 
three classes. First come the sonnets of the ' Passionate Pilgrim,' 
some of which rise out of the relations between Venus and Adonis, 
and most of which are in the same strain, treating the theme of 
love with a certain lightness. Next come the twenty-six son- 
nets placed among his Sonnets so-called, between the 127th 
and the 15 2d inclusive : sonnets sufficiently alarming at first sight, 
but not so very terrible when we examine them boldly. Finally 
comes the main body of his sonnets, addressed to his friend. 
These are in every way more powerful and mature. The second 
and third classes are, as we shall see, strongly contrasted in 
sentiment with the effusions of preceding sonneteers. 

In 1598, one Francis Meres, in a work entitled ' Palladis Tafnia, 
Wit's Treasury,' eulogised the various English poets, finding par- 
allels for them among the Greek and Latin poets. Among others, 
he remarked on Shakespeare, and said : " As the soul of Euphor- 
bus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet, witty soul 
of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare ; 
witness his Vejiiis and Adonis, his Luc?ece, his sugared So7ineis 
among his private friends," &c. The sonnets published in the 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 211 

following year in the 'Passionate Pilgrim/ which bore Shake- 
speare's name on the title-page fully answer this description : ^ 
they may with sufficient propriety be said to be animated by the 
sweet witty soul of Ovid. The rest of Shakespeare's sonnets were 
not pubhshed till 1609, when they were issued as 'Shakespeare's 
Sonnets,' " never before imprinted " ; and some critics have assev- 
erated with unaccountable confidence that the second issue must 
be the sonnets spoken of by Meres, although the publication of 
them had been delayed. There is not the slightest ground for 
this assertion : " among his private friends " cannot be taken to 
mean "to his private friend." In the sonnets of the 'Passion- 
ate Pilgrim ' there is quite enough to justify the words of Meres. 
Besides, Meres seems to have made his comparison with some 
notion of its meaning, seeing that "Venus" and " Lucrece " at 
once carry us to the Amores and the Heroides ; and in the case 
of the sonnets addressed to a friend the comparison would be 
wholly inapplicable. Further, the 107th sonnet, containing the 

line — 

"The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured," 

i7iust have been written after the death of Elizabeth, to whose 
name of " Cynthia " the line is an undoubted reference. 

Sonnets cxxvii.-clii. are, as I have said, startling at first sight. 
They are unmistakably addressed to a woman of loose character, 
and they seem to represent the poet as involved in a disreputable 
passion. But when we look more closely into them, we begin 
to suspect that, if those sonnets are to be treated as bearing all 
on one subject, we do wrong to take too serious a view of them. 
One must not treat published sonnets addressed to a courtesan 
as earnest private correspondence, or as grave confessions whis- 
pered in the ear of a ghostly counsellor. I believe that the 
proper view is to regard them as exercises of skill, undertaken 
in a spirit of wanton defiance and derision of commonplace. 
When young Hal was told of his father's triumphs, the humor- 
ous youth indulged in a curious eccentricity, which, if I am not in 
error, represents exactly the spirit of these sonnets — 

"His answer was, he would unto the stews, 
And from the commonest creature pluck a glove, 
And wear it as a favour; and with that 
He would unhorse the lustiest challenger." 



1 Part, at least, of the ' Passionate Pilgrim ' was composed by Shakespeare. 
See Mr Collier's remarks on the subject. I should be disposed to assent to nearly 
all, if not all, that Messrs Clark and Wright have published as Shakespeare's 
under that title. (See under " Marlowe.") The name " sonnet " was not confined 
to quatorzains ; several of the Passionate Pilgrim's sonnets are in the six-line staves 
used in Watson's " Passionate Century of Love." 



212 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

Now those who have gone through the overwhehiiing mass of 
sonnets poured out about the time when Shakespeare began to 
write — sonnets in admiring praise and mournful blame of Stella, 
Delia, Diana, Phyllis, and Idea — will not be slow to understand, 
if not to sympathise with, the wanton outburst of impatient genius. 
The new sonneteer lays down a humorous challenge — Give place, 
ye lovers, who boast of beauty and virtue : my mistress is neither 
fair nor faithful, yet I can praise her with as much zeal and fury 
as the best of you — 

" My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun ; 

Coral is far more red than her lips' red : 
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun ; 

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. 
I have seen roses damasked, red and white, 

But no such roses see I in her cheeks; 
And in some perfumes is there more delight, 

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. 
I love to hear her speak, yet wc:ll I know 

That music hath a far more pleasing sound; 
I grant I never saw a goddess go : 

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground : 
And yet, by Heaven, I think my love as rare 
As any she, belied by false compare." 

He is no tame admirer and adorer, seeing nothing in his mistress 
but perfection : he woos with a bolder cheer. He tells her plainly 
that he does not love her with his eyes, for they see in her a thou- 
sand errors : yet his heart loves her in spite of them (cxH.) He 
speculates on the cause of the lover's blindness : concludes that it 
comes from watching and tears : and apostrophises the cunning of 
Love in thus hiding his mistress's imperfections (cxlviii.) When 
she swears that she is made of truth, he believes her — although he 
knows that she lies (cxxxviii.) He must surely be frantic mad to 
swear her fair and think her bright when she is black as hell and 
dark as night (cxlvii.) His complaints of unkindness and allega- 
tions of cruelty might easily pass as serious, did not the other son- 
nets reveal the humorous mockery : yet they are not without the 
jocular touch. He complains of unkindness with a leniency hardly 
consistent with serious passion — 

"Tell me thou lovest elsewhere; but in my sight, 
Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside." 

That is to say, do whatever you please behind my back, but do not 
ogle other men before my eyes (cxxxix.) He accuses her of pride 
and cruelty, but warns her not to carry it too far — lest he do — 
what? commit suicide? no, but — 

" Lest sorrow lend me words, and words express 
The manner of my pity-wanting pain." 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 21 3 

Two or three of the series, and particularly cxxviii., praise the 
lady without obvious mockery, yet with a certain gay familiarity. 
The only sonnet of the series radically inconsistent with this theory 
is the 146th. Down to the 143d the gay defiant tone is unmis- 
takable : two or three after that are uncertain and equivocal, and 
the 146th seems unmistakably serious. Must we then give up the 
theory? I think not. There is an obvious explanation which one 
may produce without being liable to a charge of sophistry ; and 
that is, that Shakespeare, having taken up the relation between a 
lover and a courtesan originally in wanton humorous defiance of 
somewhat lackadaisical effusions, his dramatic instinct could not 
be restrained from pursuing the relationship farther into more 
serious aspects. 

The sonnets addressed to a friend — a young nobleman, apparently, 
whose bounty the poet has experienced, and whose personal gifts 
and graces he admires with impassioned fondness — depart very 
strikingly from the sonnets of Shakespeare's predecessors. He 
ceases to reiterate Petrarch's woes, and opens up a new vein of 
feeling. Love is still the argument — love's fears and confidences, 
crosses and triumphs — but it is love for a different object under 
different conditions. We find in Shakespeare's sonnets most of 
the commonplaces of the course of true love, coldness and recon- 
cihation, independence and devoted submission, but they are 
transferred to the course of impassioned friendship, and thereby 
transfigured. Are, then, these moods of impassioned friendship 
real or feigned, utterances from the heart, or artificial creations 
to break the monotony of the language and imagery of passionate 
admiration between the sexes? Some modern critics would have 
us believe that the theme is not friendship in any shape, real or 
feigned : the sentiment of the sonnets, they say, is too warm to 
be inspired except by the charms of woman : Shakespeare could 
not have admired beauty so fondly in any youth however beautiful. 
These critics maintain that the sonnets must have been addressed 
to a woman : and Coleridge went the length of saying that one 
sonnet where the sex is indisputable must have been introduced 
as a blind. ^ All this is the mere insanity of critical dogmatism, 
maintained in defiance of the most obtrusive facts. Mr Gerald 
Massey, not being able to get over masculine pronouns and other 
indications of gender, but still unwilling to admit that some of 
the sonnets could have been addressed to a man, professes to 
distinguish between sonnets of friendship and sonnets of sexual 
love, and redistributes them accordingly. In sonnets addressed 
unequivocally to his youthful friend, it is, says Mr Massey, manly 

1 This is hardly less curious than the amiable Opium-eater's notion that Hamlet's 
character was exceedingly like his own. 



214 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

beauty that the poet extols. What, then, are we to make of 
Sonnet iii., where the young man is told — 

" Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee 
Calls back the lovely April of her prime " ? 

Mr Massey draws the line between manly beauty and womanly 
beauty at whiteness of hand and fragrance of breath : when 
Shakespeare praises these points of beauty, he must be address- 
ing a woman. ^ Yet in Sonnet cvi. Shakespeare ascribes "sweet 
beauty's best" without distinction to ladies and lovely knights — 

" When in the chronicle of wasted time 

I see descriptions of the fairest wights, 
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme 

In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights ; 
Then in the blazon of sweet beauty's best, 

Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, 
I see their antique pen would have express'd 

Ev'n such a beauty as you master now." 

Further, Mr Massey, if I mistake not, ascribes to the friend 
Sonnet liii. containing these lines — 

** Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit 
Is poorly imitated after you; 
On Helen's cheek all art of beauty set, 

And you in Grecian tires are painted new." 

And when we look to the description of Adonis we find such 
lines as — 

" Once more the ruby-coloured portal opened 
That to his mouth did honey passage yield." 

And — 

" Who when he lived his breath and beauty set 
Gloss on the rose, smell to the violet." 

It is bad enough to defy all indications of gender and declare 
that none of these sonnets were addressed to a young man : it is 
perhaps worse to say that some are and some are not, and to 
make an arbitrary selection, taking one's own feelings as the 
exact measure of the poet's. Admiration of the personal beauty 
of his friend is too closely woven into the sonnets to be detached 
in this way. They are interpenetrated with it : it is expressed 
as warmly in sonnets when the sex happens to be unequivocal, 
as in others where the rashness of dogmatic ingenuity is restrained 
by no such accident. 

1 Gilderoy, in the ballad, is said to have a breath as sweet as rose, and a 
hand fairer than any lady's, and yet he was a manly youth whom none dared 
meet single-handed, and who " bauldly bare away the gear of many a Lawland 
loon." 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 215 

The friendship expressed in Shakespeare's sonnets was probably 
no less real than the love professed for their mistresses by other 
sonneteers. Friendship is not quite dead even in these degenerate 
days. There are still people alive to whom the warmth of the 
warmest of Shakespeare's sonnets would not appear an exaggera- 
tion. But there would seem to have been a peculiar exaltation of 
the sentiment of friendship among the Elizabethan poets. The 
titles of Edward's plays are "Damon and Pythias" and "Palamon 
and Arcite " ; and in the one that has been preserved friendship is 
extolled above all other blessings. The ' Paradise of Dainty De- 
vices ' is full of " praises of friendship." The dramatists did not 
hesitate to bring it into collision with love, and to represent it as 
rising in some cases higher than love itself. Marlowe makes Ed- 
ward II. desert his queen for the sake of Gaveston, and declare 
that he will rather lose his kingdom than renounce his favourite. 
In Lyly's " Endymion/' Eumenides affirms that " such is his un- 
spotted faith to Endymion, that whatsoever seemeth a needle to 
prick his finger is a dagger to wound his heart ; " and when it is 
in his power to obtain whatever he asks, he hesitates between the 
recovery of his friend Endymion and the possession of his mis- 
tress Semele, and is finally decided by an old man in favour of 
the friend. Shakespeare himself has treated the problem in his 
"Two Gentlemen of Verona." In Proteus, the weaker-willed 
nature, new love is an irresistible passion stronger than friendship, 
and stronger also than old love ; but in the manlier Valentine 
friendship is the nobler sentiment of the two, and even when his 
friend is convicted of the grossest treachery he comes generously 
forward and says, " All that is mine in Silvia I give thee." Com- 
mentators unable to understand this supreme and perhaps fantastic 
generosity of friendship, as Mr Gerald Massey is unable to under- 
stand the impassioned friendship of the sonnets, think there must 
be something wrong with the conclusion of the play : they wholly 
miss the design of the dramatist, and cry out that he has had re- 
course to a forced and unnatural expedient to extricate himself 
from a difficult complication. All these that I have mentioned, 
with the exception of Edward and Gaveston, were cases of friend- 
ship between equals. Bacon laid down that friendship could not 
exist between equals ; and the Elizabethans were familiar with 
the often quoted friendships between Alexander and Heph^stion, 
Hercules and Hylas, Achilles and Patrocles, Socrates and Alci- 
biades, in which the sentiment was enhanced by the charms of 
strength on the one hand, and youth and beauty on the other. 
It is not impossible that the influence of the maiden queen had 
something to do with the laudation of friendship in the Eliza- 
bethan age ; and the representation of women's parts on the stage 
by boys may have fostered to an unusual degree the sentimental 



2l6 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

admiration of beautiful •youths. This last influence could hardly 
but have affected Shakespeare, seeing that he acted up to boys in 
that character, and that they must occasionally have crossed his 
mind with their " small pipes " and "smooth and rubious " lips 
when he was composing praises of the beauty that they repre- 
sented. And it is difficult to see what can have been meant by 
the expression " Socratem ingenio" — a Socrates in disposition — 
in Shakespeare's epitaph, if it does not point to his sentiment for 
beautiful young men. 

The sonnets, with the exception perhaps of the first seventeen 
advising his beautiful friend to marry, which may have been the 
poet's first offering of verses, or may have been composed at any 
time and placed first as a suitable preface, seem to follow the 
history of the friendship. I do not quite agree with Mr Armitage 
Brown's division of the ' Sonnets ' into separate poems, in each of 
which the sonnet form is merely used as a stanza ; but it seems to 
me unmistakable that there is a sequence in them, not only to this 
extent that several consecutive sonnets are occupied with the same 
theme, but to this further extent that the themes are consecutive, 
arising naturally as if in the course of the poet's varying relations 
with his friend, relations real or imagined. Certainly there is no 
justification for the course that Mr Massey has adopted of treating 
the sonnets as if they had been written on separate slips to dif- 
ferent persons for different purposes, and shuffled together by the 
publisher. 

The great question in connection with the sonnets is, who was 
Shakespeare's friend and the object of his praises? The poet's 
lofty promise of immortal memory has been fulfilled more liberally 
and less exactly than he intended : he, or his publisher for him, 
may be said to have immortalised everybody in that generation 
whose initials are known to have been W. and H., read either 
way ; and the actual friend comes in for nothing more than a share 
of the disputed honour, if, indeed, he has as yet been recognized 
at all. 

By the testimony of the sonnets themselves, Shakespeare's 
friend was young and beautiful, of rank superior to the poet, a 
bountiful patron, and very much courted by rival poets. Now two 
young noblemen are known to have extended their patronage to 
Shakespeare — Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and Wil- 
liam Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. It was to Southampton that 
Shakespeare dedicated ' Venus and Adonis ' — the first heir of his 
invention — in 1593, and * Lucrece ' in the following year. The 
first dedication was couched in terms of distant respect : the 
second, which was as follows, bears in its warmth of expression 
a striking similarity to the language of the sonnets, particularly 
sonnet 26; — "The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end ; 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 21/ 

whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous 
moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not 
the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. 
What I have done is yours ; what I have to do is yours ; being 
part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my 
duty would show greater ; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your 
lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happi- 
ness." There is also a tradition that Southampton at one time 
made the poet a present of a thousand pounds. The evidence for 
the patronage of Shakespeare by Pembroke is not so pointed, but 
is quite trustworthy. Shakespeare's fellow-players, Heming and 
Condell, dedicated the folio of 1623 to the " incomparable pair 
of brethren," the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Montgomery, 
caUing the poet " your servant Shakespeare," and mentioning that 
they had " prosecuted both the plays and their author living with 
much favour." Both Southampton and Pembroke were younger 
men than the poet, Southampton by nine years (being born in 
1573), Pembroke by sixteen years (being born in 1580). There is 
no record of personal beauty in Southampton, while there is in the 
case of Pembroke : but the known partiahty of affection forbids 
us to lay much stress on that. Both were bountiful patrons of 
literature, and had sonnets addressed to them by Daniel, Chap- 
man, Withers, and many others. 

When we cast about for presumptions to turn the balance of 
probability one way or the other, we naturally look first to the 
inscription prefixed to the sonnets by the publisher. It runs as 

follows : " To THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF THESE INSUING SONNETS 

Mr W. H. all happiness and that eternitie promised by 
OUR ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adven- 
turer in setting forth T.T." Now the phrase " only begetter " 
sounds strange in nineteenth-century ears ; 7ve should call the poet 
the only begetter.^ But the humility of dedication was carried 
much farther by the Elizabethans. Shakespeare himself, in 
dedicating his " Lucrece" to Southampton, used the expression — 
"what I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours." It 
is in allusion to this practice of poets that the Duke in " Twelfth 
Night," apostrophising greatness cries — 

" Thousand escapes of wit 
Make thee "Cae. father of their idle dreams." 

And in the dedication of Daniel's sonnets to " Delia," to the 
Countess of Pembroke, the mother of the young Earl of Pembroke 

1 Too much stress should not be given to the "only." It need mean nothing 
more than " matchless," " incomparable"; a strong superlative, as in the phrases 
" 07ily rare poet," " o?ily expected imp of a noble house," or Shakespeare's 
own expression in the first sonnet — " only herald of the gaudy spring." 



2l8 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

just mentioned, we seem to have the very original of " T. T.'s " 
expression. 1 "Vouchsafe," the poet says — 

" Vouchsafe now to accept them as thine own, 
Begotten by thy hand and my desire, 
Wherein my zeal and thy great might is shown." 

And this although Lady Mary was not Delia, but only lent her 
name to countenance the young poet's first effusion. Had, then, 
Mr W. H. no nearer relation than this to Shakespeare's Sonnets : 
was he not the noble young friend, but only some person whose 
favour T. T. was anxious to conciliate ? One does not like to say 
dogmatically what a bookseller might or might not have done 
in those days, but I am inclined to think that *' Mr W. H." must 
stand for Shakespeare's friend and patron — for this reason, that 
I cannot bring myself to believe that any bookseller would have 
dared to divert the poet's promise of immortality from a person 
of rank such as Shakespeare's friend and patron undoubtedly was. 
I do not think the " Mr " need stand in our way. Sidney is 
called Master Philip Sidney in Webbe's ' Discourse of English 
Poetry,' and Lord Buckhurst is entered as M. Sackville in ' Eng- 
land's Parnassus.' Certainly, although so great an authority as 
Mr Collier considers " Mr " a serious difficulty, it is much easier 
to find probable reasons for the title than to find any tolerable 
reason for the bookseller's appropriating the poet's promise for 
the benefit of a friend of his own so obscure that history has 
preserved no memorial of his name. This would have been so 
idiotic that it is incredible. I see no reason for refusing to beheve 
that W. H. are the initials of the name of Shakespeare's friend. 
Now, curiously enough, W. H. are the initials of William Her- 
bert, Earl of Pembroke, and H. W. are the initials of Henry 
Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Dr Nathan Drake contended 
that the Earl of Southampton was meant, and that the inversion 
of the initials was intended as a blind. But if any blind was 
thought necessary, why have a dedication at all ? And why use 
a blind that must at once draw suspicion on the Earl of Pem- 
broke? If the "Mr" was blind enough, the inversion of the 
initials was unnecessary — and if it was not, then the Earl of Pem- 
broke was pointed to ; and if the sonnets were such that the 
Earl of Southampton was ashamed of them, it is not likely that 
T. T. would have fathered them on the Earl of Pembroke. But 
though the initials have proved a sufficient blind to the eyes of 
posterity, I doubt very much whether any blind was intended 
or effected by them when they first appeared. In all probability, 

1 But the truth is, that the original might have been found in any dedication 
from Geoffrey of Monmouth's downwards. It is a commonplace compliment 
from poet to patron. — 1885. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 219 

the object of Shakespeare's sonnets was perfectly well known to 
the first readers of them : and W. H. pointed to William Herbert 
as sure as T. T. pointed to Thomas Thorpe the bookseller.^ 

There is one circumstance which at first glance appears insig- 
nificant, but which, when considered, appears an almost conclusive 
presumption in favour of the Earl of Pembroke, and that is the 
parent that Shakespeare's friend is said to take after. In the 3d 
sonnet the friend is told — 

" Thou art thy mother^ s glass, and she in thee 
Calls back the lovely April of her prime." 

Now it is open to say that this means no more than that Shake- 
speare's friend bore a resemblance to his mother more than to 
his father. But it is difficult to be satisfied with this interpreta- 
tion when we remember who was " Pembroke's mother," and 
recall Ben Jonson's famous epitaph — 

" Underneath this sable hearse 
Lies the subject of all verse, 
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother ; 
Death ! ere thou hast slain another 
Learned and fair and good as she, 
Time shall throw a dart at thee." 

No illustrious family ever won the hearts of the poets so complete- 
ly as the Sidneys, and not of the poets only but of all men ; they 
were universal favourites. As Sidney was considered the jewel 
of Ehzabeth's Court, and his sister the paragon of her sex, so 
Pembroke was said to be " the most universally beloved and 
esteemed of any man " of his age. This lends additional point 
to Shakespeare's urgency for the marriage of his friend : he might 
well be anxious for the preservation of so noble a stock. 

Any inference to be drawn from dates is also on the whole 
favourable to the claims of Pembroke as against Southampton. 
One thing, indeed, at first seems to be in favour of Southampton 
— namely, the number of coincidences in expression between the 
sonnets and comedies composed before the end of the century. 
But two facts combine to deprive this argument from coincidences 

1 Seeing that Shakespeare lays so much stress on their difference of rank 
in the sonnets, and agrees that he cannot always be acknowledged in public, it 
would have been inconsistent for him to have dedicated them openly in his own 
name to his patron at full length. This may account for the publisher's taking the 
dedication in hand, and as it were endorsing the compliments of the poet. It 
might even have been necessary that the sonnets should appear to be published 
without consent of either poet or patron, and that the publisher should use the 
timid but transparent veil of" Mr W. H." as if he had made the dedication of his 
own accord and without permission. But this, of course, is pure speculation. 



220 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

of any value. One is that it was in those plays that Shakespeare 
made his first studies of the non-tragical relations between lovers, 
and formed his ways of looking at and expressing those relations : 
it was inevitable, therefore, that when he took up the parallel rela- 
tions of friendship, the treatment should exhibit coincidences. 
And the other is that the comedies were frequently repeated, so 
that the poet was not allowed to forget his earlier studies : he 
might have gone home any evening before 1609 with his head full 
of •' Love's Labour Lost " or the " Comedy of Errors." We can- 
not, therefore, argue from coincidences in idea and expression that 
a sonnet and a play were composed at the same date. The only 
sonnet of really indisputable date is the 107th, containing the 
reference to the death of Elizabeth or " Cynthia " as the eclipse 
of " the mortal moon " : this must have been composed after it 
had been seen that Elizabeth's death was to be followed by no 
dangerous consequences. This sonnet must have been composed 
some time after March 1603. Now, in the 104th sonnet, the poet 
tells his friend that three winters and three summers have passed 
since first they met. If, then, there is any chronological sequence 
in the sonnets, if there is not a gap of several years between the 
104th and the 107th — and in the absence of evidence to the con- 
trary the presumption is that there is not — this would seem to 
show that Shakespeare made the acquaintance of his friend not 
long before the beginning of the century. Which conclusion 
exactly suits the claims of Pembroke, who came to London in 
1598, a youth of 18 — and is radically adverse to the claims of 
Southampton, whom Shakespeare knew at least as early as 1594. 
The argument is not entitled to much weight, inasmuch as it pre- 
sumes a chronological sequence, but it deserves to be mentioned 
as a slight corroboration. 

Again, in the first sonnet, where the poet opens his recommen- 
dations of marriage, the friend is called '' only herald to the gaudy 
spring." What gaudy spring ? Is this another reference to the 
time described in the 107th sonnet — 

" Incertainties now crown themselves assured, 
And peace proclaims olives of endless age. 
Now with the drops of this most balmy time 
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes"? 

The minds of men seem to have been agitated by the fear of a 
disputed succession after the death of Elizabeth, and there was a 
disposition, partly from relief at the passing of the crisis without 
disturbance, and partly from a desire to flatter the new king, to 
hail the accession of James hopefully and joyfully as a spring. 
Thus Daniel in his Panegyric to the King's Most Excellent 
Majesty, exclaimed — 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 221 

" What a return of comfort dost thou bring, 
Now at this fresh returning of our blood ! 
This meeting with the opening of the spring, 

To make our spirits likewise to embud ! 
What a new season of encouraging 
Begins to enlength the days disposed to good ! 
What apprehension of recovery 
Of greater strength, of more ability ! 

The pulse of England never yet did beat 

So strong as now : nor ever were our hearts 
Let out to hopes so spacious and so great 

As now they are : nor ever in all parts 
Did we thus feel so comfortable heat 

As now the glory of thy worth imparts : 
The whole complexion of the commonwealth 

So weak before, hoped never for more health." 

It is not at all improbable that Shakespeare's " gaudy spring " was 
this same exultant season ; and if so, Southampton cannot have 
been the friend addressed with such glowing flattery and urgent 
fervour, seeing that he had then been married for several years. 
Pembroke was then twenty- three years of age, and, as the represen- 
tative of the Sidneys, might well be hailed as " the world's fresh 
ornament," and " only herald of the gaudy spring." The fact is, 
that the more one looks into this vexed question, the more does 
one find little particulars emerging, singly inconclusive, but all in- 
creasing the weight of the probabiHty that Pembroke was the man.^ 

Let us turn now for a moment to a question hardly less interest- 
ing, namely — Who was the rival poet alluded to in the sonnets ? 
So complete is the parallel of this course of true friendship to 
the course of true love that even the passion of jealousy finds a 
place. Nine sonnets (Ixxviii.-lxxxvi.) are occupied with the 
pretensions of other poets, and one poet in particular, to the 
gracious countenance of his patron. In the 8oth sonnet he 
cries : — 

" O how I faint when I of you do write, 

Knowing a better spirit doth use your name, 
And in the praise thereof spends all his might, 

To make me tongue-tied, speaking of your fame ! 
But since your worth, wide as the ocean is, 

The humble as the proudest sail doth bear, 
My saucy bark inferior far to his 

On your broad main doth wilfully appear." 

Who was this "better spirit"? I hope I shall not be held 
guilty of hunting after paradox if I say that every possible poet 

1 Mr Thomas Tyler and Rev. W. A. Harrison have recently adduced new argu- 
ments in favour of Pembroke. See Academy, March 8 and 22, April 19, June 7 
and 21, July 5, 1884. 



222 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 

has been named but the right one, nor of presumption if I say- 
that he is so obvious that his escape from notice is something 
little short of miraculous. The 86th sonnet supplies ample means 
of identification : — 

" Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, 

Bound for the prize of all too precious you, 
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inherse. 

Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew? 
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write 

Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead? 
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night 

Giving him aid, my verse astonished. 
He, nor that affable familiar ghost 

Which nightly gulls him Math intelligence, 
As victors of my silence cannot boast : 

I was not sick of any fear from thence : 
But when your countenance filled up his line. 
Then lacked I matter; that enfeebled mine." 

The allusions to supernatural assistance are here very pointed, 
and upon the strength of them Marlowe has been suggested as 
having been a man of dark and mysterious reputation, who was 
suspected of dealings with evil spirits. The insuperable objection 
to Marlowe is that he died in 1593 ; and even supposing South- 
ampton to have been Shakespeare's patron, we have no evidence 
of their acquaintance prior to 1593, and there is no evidence that 
Marlowe was acquainted with Southampton at all. Mr Massey, 
however, argues confidently for Marlowe, on the ground that there 
was nobody else to whom the pointed charge of supernatural 
dealing could apply. But there was another to whom the allusions 
apply more pointedly than to Marlowe, and that was George 
Chapman, a man less honoured now, but numbered in his own 
generation among the greatest of its poets. Chapman was a man 
of overpowering enthusiasm, ever eager in magnifying poetry, and 
advancing fervent claims to supernatural inspiration. In 1594 
he published a poem called the "Shadow of Night," which goes 
far to establish his identity with Shakespeare's rival. In the Ded- 
ication, after animadverting severely on vulgar searchers after 
knowledge, he exclaims — " Now what a supererogation in wit this 
is, to think Skill so mightily pierced with their loves that she 
should prostitutely show them her secrets, when she will scarcely 
be looked upon by others but with invocation^ fasting, watching; 
yea, not without having drops of their son Is like a heavenly familiar. 
Here we have something like a profession of the familiar ghost 
that Shakespeare saucily laughs at. But Shakespeare's rival gets 
his intelligence by night : special stress is laid in the sonnet upon 
the aid of his compeers by night, and his nightly familiar. Well, 
Chapman's poem is called the " Shadow of Night," and its 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 223 

purpose is to extol the wonderful powers of Night in impart- 
ing knowledge to her votaries. He addresses her with fervent 
devotion : — 

" Rich tapered sanctuary of the blest, 

Palace of ruth, made all of tears and rest, 

To thy black shades and desolation 

I consecrate my life." 

And he cries : — 

" All you possessed with indepressed spirits, 
Endued with nimble and aspiring wits, 
Come consecrate with me to sacred Night 
Your whole endeavours and detest the light. 

No pen can anything eternal write 

That is not steeped in humour of the Night." 

It is not simply that night is the best season for study : the 
enthusiastic poet finds more active assistance than silence and 
freedom from interruption. When the avenues of sense are 
closed by sleep, his soul rises to the court of Skill (the mother 
of knowledge, who must be propitiated by drops of the soul like 
an heavenly familiar), and if he could only remember what he 
learns there, no secret would be hid from him. 

" Let soft sleep, 
Binding my senses lose my working soul, 
That in her highest pitch she may control 
The court of Skill, compact of mystery. 
Wanting hut franchisement and memory 
To reach all secrets." 

As regards the other feature in the rival poet, " the proud full 
sail of his great verse," that applies with almost too literal exact- 
ness to the Alexandrines of Chapman's Homer, part of which 
appeared in 1596^, and as for its being bound for the prize of 
Shakespeare's patron, both Pembroke and Southampton were in- 
cluded in the list of those honoured with dedicatory sonnets in a 
subsequent edition. Chapman's chief patron was Sir Francis 
Walsingham, whose daughter Sir Philip Sidney had married, and 
nothing could have been more natural than that the old man 
should introduce his favourite to the Countess of Pembroke or 
her son. But apart from Alexandrines and proved or probable 
connection with Southampton and Pembroke, I contend that 
the other reference to Chapman is too pointed to be mistaken ; 
and though Chapman's name has not received due prominence in 
the manuals of our literature, no one who has read any of his 
poetry, and who knows his own lofty pretensions and the rank 
accorded him in his own generation, will think that his " proud 
sail " has been unduly honoured by the affected jealousy and 
good-humoured banter of the " saucy bark " of Shakespeare. 



CHAPTER VL 
DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 

A VERY natural question to ask, in beginning the study of the 
EHzabethan drama, is, What were the causes of that extraordinary 
outburst of creative genius? No satisfactory answer has yet been 
given to that question : perhaps none can be given. There the 
hterature stands full grown ; but when we are asked how it came 
there, we can do little more than point to the names of its creators, 
and say that their genius was equal to the task of producing it. 

Time, with its slow development of new theatrical customs out 
of new social needs, brought them their opportunity. The stimu- 
lating novelty of the form must stand first in the list of " causes " 
of the greatness of the Elizabethan drama. The significance of 
this simple fact, as generally happens with obvious facts, has been 
overlooked by etiological speculators. Two great types of drama 
— using the word as equivalent to tragic drama — have been born 
into the world ; both attained their supreme height within a 
generation of their birth, and all subsequent attempts to revive 
their early magnificence have been little better than mechanical 
attempts to make a living body. If we wish to know what the 
Greek type of drama is capable of, we must go to the Athenian 
dramatists of the fifth centurv B.C. ; and if we wish to know what 
the English type of drama is capable of, we must go to Shake- 
speare and his immediate contemporaries and successors. The 
fascination of these organs of expression for the human spirit was 
greatest while they were new. To put it somewhat mathemati- 
cally, in the first generation of their existence they drew towards 
them irresistibly a larger proportion of free intellect than they 
were ever able to attract in subsequent generations. This is the 
law of all subjects of disinterested intellectual effort, whether 
artistic or scientific. The most ambitious intellects rush after the 
newest subjects with which they have affinity : if the subjects are 
great, and succeed in fascinating congenial minds, then the results 
are great. 



DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 225 

Such was the happy fortune of the Ehzabethan drama — a 
fortune that comes to the human race at rare intervals. While 
Sackville, Gascoigne, and Daniel were composing scholarly imita- 
tions of the Greek drama to produce a feeble agitation of pity and 
terror in the minds of Cynthia and her courtiers, lifeless shadows 
of a once glorious form, Fortune beckoned to Marlowe and showed 
him the way to a new dramatic world. Marlowe was really tiie 
Columbus of the English drama. It is not very easy to say now 
what it was that induced him, a university man, to give his pen 
to the service of the common stage, and try to redeem it from 
"the gigging veins of rhyming mother-wits ; " it is not impossible 
that he had heard of the success of the popular drama in Spain. 
But whatever moved him to write " Tamburlaine " for a vulgar 
audience, he was the first to enter in and take possession of a 
region which offered infinite new possibilities to the dramatist. 

The representation of passionate conflict was insuperably ham- 
pered by the conditions of the Greek stage. The large Greek 
theatres necessitated masks and padded and stiffened figures : and 
thus lively conflict, whether of mind or body, was rendered 
impossible. English dramatists, writing for actors who came on 
the stage in their natural faces and figures, were throwing away 
their opportunities for giving a more vivid representation of life 
when they accommodated themselves to Greek models. By good 
luck or sagacious insight, Marlowe initiated a drama that took 
full advantage of the changed manner of stage representation. 
Men could now be brought face to face in passionate antagonism, 
and all the vicissitudes of the struggle put before the spectator 
with lifelike force. What a revelation it was ! what a fascination 
it must have had upon all dramatic minds ! The Elizabethans 
were called upon to re-write the history of human passion in all 
its phases and stages : and there were men among them who took 
delight in the task that Fate or Fortune had imposed. They 
fulfilled their mission with keen emulation : they reaped the 
harvest with such thoroughness as to leave little behind for the 
gleaners of after-times. 

Many circumstances favoured them : many things must contri- 
bute to the success of such an enterprise. England had very 
recently passed through the crisis of the Reformation, and was 
still excited and exalted to an unusual pitch of energy by appre- 
hensions of intestine plots and foreign invasion : the pulse of the 
country beat high with success and thirst for new enterprise. 
When men are unfortunate and despondent, they have no heart 
to go and look at the mimicry of action and passion : it is only 
when their enterprises succeed that they can go with free hearts 
and applaud the heroics of Tamburlaine or weep over the sorrows 
of Desdemona. The Elizabethans were prosperous in war and 



226 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 

in commerce : they repelled the Spaniard, and brought home 
richly laden argosies from east and west : they were strong, thriv- 
ing, hopeful men, with nerves that could bear a good thrill of 
tragic horror, and sides that the most boisterous laughter was 
unable to shake too rudely. But one must have no small confi- 
dence in the power of general conditions over specific effects who 
would venture to say that our dramatists would never have come 
into existence, or would have sought some other line of activity, had 
Mary remained upon the throne instead of Elizabeth, and had 
England continued at peace with Spain. Doubtless a material 
basis of prosperity was indispensable to the support of dramatic 
entertainments : it was absolutely necessary that there should be 
enough free wealth to fill the theatres. But one fails to see what 
the stir of the Reformation had to do with the dramatic tendencies 
of Marlowe, or how the defeat of the Armada was concerned in 
the migration of Shakespeare from Stratford to the London stage. 

A more vital condition of the great dramatic outburst was the 
abundance of material lying ready to the shaping and inspiring 
genius of the dramatist. There were numberless tales and chroni- 
cles of love and war to furnish him with plots or suggestions of 
plots : even if he knew no language but his own, the enterprise of 
printers had furnished him not only with the works of native poets 
and chroniclers, but with hosts of translations from Italian, French, 
and Latin. Observation of men was a prevailing passion, and 
literature was crowded with sententious maxims of character and 
politics. The passion of love had been expressed in many different 
moods and phases, and attempts had been made to treat with be- 
coming gravity the tragic themes of disaster and death. Literature 
was undoubtedly ripe for dramatic embodiment. 

In studying the development of the drama under Elizabeth, a 
broad distinction must be drawn between the Court stage and the 
popular stage. The Court stage was ruled by classical traditions 
and Italian precedents ; it was in the popular stage that the new 
drama was rooted, and it is there that we must look for the first 
sprouts of its vigorous life. It was an age of widespread interest 
in play-acting ; but there were two very different kinds of theatrical 
audience, and the plays that pleased the one would have been far 
from satisfactory to the other. The difference was as great as the 
difference now is between east-end theatres and west-end, probably 
greater and more clearly marked. The audiences had different 
tastes, and plays were written and acted to correspond. Amateur 
companies were formed at the public schools, at the universities, 
at the Inns of Court, and their performances were graced occasion- 
ally with the presence of royalty. Between 1568 and 1580, Mr 
Collier tells us, some fifty dramas were presented at Court. To 
judge from such specimens as remain, the authors of these fashion- 



DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. • 22/ 

able plays followed literary usages in their compositions. Their 
comedies were modelled on the new Italian comedy ; their trage- 
dies abstained from the actual exhibition of violent passion, and 
dreadful deeds were told but not enacted. Lyly and Daniel, 
rivals for the Mastership of the Revels, furnish a clue to the 
Queen's taste, by which the fashion was determined. Her prede- 
cessor, " Bloody " Mary, had apparently a liking for broad and 
boisterous farce. But Queen Elizabeth \vas a person of much more 
culture and refinement. The light sparkling word-play of Lyly, and 
the gentle decorous passion of Daniel, were more after her stand- 
ard than farcical buffoonery or violent tragedy. How high the 
quarrel ran at the end of her reign between the fashionable critics 
and the caterers for the common stage, w^e may gather from the 
conversation between Hamlet and Rosencrantz on the subject : 
*' There was, for a \vhile, no money bid for argument, unless the 
poet and the player went to cuffs in the question." 

This rough distinction between the Court stage and the com- 
mon stage is of importance, because it is true in the main to say 
that the great work effected by the genius of Shakespeare and his 
contemporaries was the reconciliation of the two stages by the 
union of what was best in both. Doubtless, in all that they had to 
say against coarseness, rant, bombast, absurd and revolting incident, 
the literary critics were in the right. So far, their contemptuous 
laughter at the common stage was well founded. But they failed 
to see that the common stage, in throwing off the restrictions of 
Horace and Aristotle upon violent incident — restrictions due to 
the accidents of Greek theatrical representation — had set dra- 
matists free for a new kind of work. The preposterous half-serious 
tyrants of Mysteries, Moralities, and Chronicle Histories, the Pilate, 
the Herod, the Magnificence, the King Cambyses, when they 
committed and superintended deeds of blood before the eyes of 
a half-shuddering, half-laughing audience, were making possible 
the full presentation on the stage of such characters as Othello 
and Macbeth. But for the infusion of new life from the common 
stage, Daniel's " Cleopatra " might have remained the high-water 
mark of the poetic drama ; and but for the ingrafting of the cul- 
ture of centuries on its wild stock, the common stage might never 
have risen above the vein of King Cambyses. 

Marlowe was not exactly the first to represent on the stage 
actions that the Greek dramatist supposed to take place behind 
the scenes and communicated to the audience in a subsequent 
narrative by an eyewitness. Among Mr Collier's reprints is an 
example of a mixed morality and history, containing the revenge 
of Orestes upon his mother and her paramour, and mixing up 
personified abstractions. Vice, Nature, Truth, Fame, Duty, with 
Orestes, Clytemnestra, ^gisthus, Menelaus, and other actual per- 



228 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 

sonages. In this drama there is a lively battle upon the stage, 
with a direction, " let it be long ere you can win the city ; " and 
though Clytemnestra is dismissed under custody, ^gisthus is 
seized, dragged violently, and hanged before the audience in spite 
of his entreaties for mercy. The date of this drama is 1567, and 
from it we may conclude that as early as that date the popular in- 
stinct had broken through the restrictions of Horace, founded as 
they were upon the natural limitations of a stage wholly different 
in structure and appointments from our own. While, at Court, 
frigid and artificial restrictions were maintained when the neces- 
sity for them no longer existed, they were cast aside in perfor- 
mances for the entertainment of the rude vulgar. Marlowe's 
position, therefore, is this : he did not originate the idea of bring- 
ing tragic action on the stage, but he was the first writer of plays 
whose genius was adequate to the powerful situations introduced 
by the popular instinct for dramatic effect. 



I. — John Lyly (1554-1606). 

John Lyly, the Euphuist,^ " the witty, comical, facetiously quick 
and unparalleled John Lyly," was our first extensive writer of 
comedies. He produced no fewer than nine pieces — one in blank 
verse, seven in prose, and one in rhyme, " The Woman in the 
Moon " (which is in blank verse, and which he calls " his first 
dream in Phoebus' holy bower," though not printed till 1597) ; 
"Alexander and Campaspe " (printed in 1584); ''Sappho and 
Phao" (1584) ;"Endymion" (1591) ;''Galathea" (1592); "Mi- 
das " (1592) ; "Mother Bombie " (1594) ; "The Maid's Meta- 
morphosis " (in rhyme and only probably his, 1600) ; " Love's Met- 
amorphosis " (1601). Lyly's plays are the sort of gay, fantastic, 
insubstantial things that may catch widely as a transient fashion, 
but are too extravagant to receive sympathy from more than one 
generation : critics in general set their heels on his delicate con- 
structions. His plays were acted by the children of the Revels, 
and he would seem to have indulged in airy and childish caprices 
of fancy to match. Perhaps he wrote with an abiding conscious- 
ness that ladies were to make the chief part of his audience, and 
thought only of bringing smiles on their faces with pretty quibbles 
and mildly sentimental or childishly jocular situations. In " En- 
dymion," Tellus expresses surprise that Corsites, being a captain, 
" who should sound nothing but terror, and suck nothing but 
blood," talks so softly and politely. " It agreeth not with your 

1 I have given some account of his Euphuism in my ' Manual of Englisli Prose 
Literature.' Lyly was a great tobacco-taker; one wonders tliat no devoted 
champion of the weed has ever remarked the coincidence between its introduction 
and the beginning of the greatness of the Enghsh drama. 



JOHN LYLY. 229 

calling," she says, " to use words so soft as that of love." And 
Corsites replies with the utmost urbanity — " Lady, it were unfit 
of wars to discourse with women, into whose minds nothing can 
sink but smoothness." In accordance with this idea, Lyly's sub- 
jects, except in "Alexander and Campaspe " and "Mother Bom- 
bie," are mythological and pastoral : and in none of them is any 
deep feeling excited. He is careful not to alarm his courtly audi- 
ence with the prospect of terrible consequences : the stream of 
incidents moves with very slight interruptions to a happy conclu- 
sion, enlivened with fantastic love-talk, fantastic moralisings on 
ambition, war, peace, avarice, illicit love, and other commonplaces, 
and the pranks and puns of mischievous vivacious boys. The fabric 
is so slight and artificial that we are in danger of undervaluing the 
powers of the workman, who was a most ingenious and original 
man, and deserved all the adjectives of his publisher. His plays 
are vessels filled to the brim with sparkling liquor, which stands to 
Shakespeare's comedy in the relation of lemonade to champagne. 
The whole thing is a sort of ginger-pop intoxication ; with airy 
bubbles of fanciful conceits winking all over. 

If there is no extravagance of passion in Lyly, there is the ut- 
most extravagance of ingenious fancy. Wit being defined as an 
ingenious and unexpected play upon words, Lyly's comedies are 
full of it. There is hardly a sentence in the whole of them that 
does not contain some pun, or clever antithesis, or far-fetched 
image. He is so uninterruptedly witty that he destroys his own 
wit : the play on words and images ceases to be unexpected, and 
so falls out of the definition. Yet a little of it is very pretty even 
now ; and if we could call up the Children of the Chapel Royal 
to fire off his crackers, and poise his glittering conceits, and im- 
agine ourselves listening with the much-flattered Cynthia, we 
might conceive the possibility of sitting out a whole comedy with 
pleased faces. 

Lyly carries his love of contrast and delicate symmetrical ar- 
rangement into the structure of his plays, scene being balanced 
against scene, and character against character. In " Alexander 
and Campaspe," his first pubhshed play, he attempted, after the 
model of Edwards's " Damon and Pythias," more substantial char- 
acters than he afterwards produced in his mythological and pas- 
toral conceptions. One of his most elaborate and characteristic 
personages is Sir Tophas, in " Endymion," a fat, vainglorious, fool- 
ish squire, who struts about armed with weapons of sport, and 
breathing out bloodthirsty sentiments against wrens, blackbirds, 
sheep, and other such harmless enemies. Sir Tophas is the Fal- 
staff of children, reminding us of the story that Shakespeare when 
a boy used to kill a calf with an air : he has also points of resem- 
blance with Pistol, Holofernes, and Don Armado. He has a little 



230 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 

follower 'Epitoii, like Armado's Moth, with whom he holds dis- 
courses, and he falls in love with Dipsas, as Armado with Jaque- 
netta. 

" Tophas. Epi. 

Epiton. Here, sir. 

Top. I brook not this idle humour of love; it tickles not my liver, from 
whence lovemongers in former ages seemed to infer it should proceed. 

Epi. Love, sir, may lie in your lungs, and I think it doth, and that is the 
cause you blow and are so pursy. 

Top. Tush, boy; I think it is but some device of the poet to get money. 

Epi. A poet; what's that? 

Top. Dost thou not know what a poet is? 

Epi. No. 

Top. Why, fool, a poet is as much as one should say — a poet. But soft ! 
yonder be two wrens; shall I shoot at them? 

Epi. They are two lads. 

Top. Larks or wrens, I will kill them. 

Epi. Larks? are you blind? they are two little boys. 

Top. Birds or hoys, they are but a pittance for my breakfast ; therefore 
have at them, for their brains must as it were embroider my bolts." 

The finest things in Lyly's plays are the occasional songs. 
" Cupid and my Campaspe played " is often quoted, and Sappho's 
song is hardly less pretty. 

" O cruel Love ! on thee I lay 
My curse, which shall strike blind the day; 
Never may sleep with velvet hand 
Charm thine eyes with sacred wand ; 
Thy jailors shall be hopes and fears; 
Thy prison-mates groans, sighs, and tears; 
Thy play to wear out weary times 
Fantastic passions, vows, and rhymes ; 
Thy bread be frowns; thy drink be gall; 
Such as when you Phao call 
The bed thou liest on by despair; 
Thy sleep, fond dreams: thy dreams, long care; 
Hope (like thy fool), at thy bed's head. 
Mock thee, till madness strike thee dead. 
As Phao, thou dost me, with thy proud eyes; 
In thee poor Sappho lives, for thee she dies." 



II. — Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). 

When we pass from Lyly to Marlowe we find ourselves in a 
wholly different atmosphere. They wrote for a different audience, 
a different stage, different actors ; and the plays are not more 
unlike than were the lives and characters of the authors. The 
plays written by Lyly for the Court, and represented by the 
children of the Chapel Royal, do not come up to M. Taine's 
description of the ferocity of English manners in that age : their 



CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 23 I 

mythological and pastoral worlds are the opposite of a violent and 
complete expansion of nature. In Marlowe's plays, on the other 
hand, written for the public theatre, there is ferocity enough, and 
a good many of the restraints of nature as well as of probability 
are violently broken through. Passing from Lyly to Marlowe is 
like passing from sentimental modern comedy to the blood and 
convulsion, powder and poison drama that still keeps its hold 
in many of our theatres. M. Taine should not have been so 
anxious to make out that the Elizabethan drama was a faithful 
reflection of the manners of the Court : one might as soon take 
Mr Boucicault's Irish dramas as an index to the character of the 
modern Enghsh gentleman. It is the pit and not the boxes that 
theatrical managers must chiefly keep in view, if they wish their 
theatres to pay : we are not entitled to infer, from the thrilling 
agonies, fierce passions, and bloodthirsty heroics of the Elizabethan 
drama, anything except that they pleased the body of the house. 
Modern critics have endorsed the judgment of the Elizabethan 
pit ; Lyly and Daniel, with their gentle plays adapted to gentle 
ears, now require an education to appreciate them, while we are 
never weary of admiring the gigantic powers that dared to express 
the tempest and whirlwind of unrestrained passion. But it is not 
by any means certain that this was the view taken by the gallants 
of the day, who lounged on the stage or in the boxes ("rooms," 
as they were then called), and exchanged chaff with the ground- 
lings : it is not impossible that the violent passions of the drama, 
so far from being an attraction for them by natural affinity, were 
the subjects of their derision, torn to tatters as the passions most 
usually have been by robustious actors. The passion for heroics 
and horrors was by no means universal in the Elizabethan age 
any more than in our own. Thomas Nash ridiculed vainglorious 
tragedians with their swelling bombast of bragging blank verse. 
Lodge even ventured to deride the cries for revenge uttered by 
the Ghost in " Hamlet," a part represented, according to tradition, 
by the divine dramatist himself. Tragedy was one of the themes 
of the weak and conceited satires of Joseph Hall. The eulogists 
of Shakespeare lay stress not upon his power of expressing tragic 
passions, but upon his sweet witty soul, his mellifluous and honeyed 
tongue, his silver tongue, his honey-flowing vein, and the sugared 
tongues and attractive beauty of his personages. Entries remain 
in the ' Accounts of the Revels,' of dramas by Shakespeare pre- 
sented at the Court of James : the list comprises one tragedy, one 
historical play, and eight comedies. Everything goes to show 
that in the Elizabethan age persons of fashion and refinement, 
if they did not actually consider tragedy vulgar, at least had 
a preference for comedy. The spirit then prevailing on that 
point at Court was not so very different from what prevailed 



232 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPP:ARE. 

when Chaucer wrote, and made his representative of" the gentles" 
put a stop to the tragic recitals of the Monk. 

The tragic drama emanated from the people. It had its begin- 
nings in the public theatre, and its first and greatest authors were 
men of the people. Men do not learn passion and the expression 
of passion, so far as these can be learnt, from national movements, 
but from the experience of their own individual struggle for exist- 
ence or fame. Men of easy unvaried lives, who have never had to 
fight with poverty or slander, the malice of fortune or the malice 
of men, cannot be dramatists. 

Marlowe was only two months older than Shakespeare, having 
been born in February 1564. His fiither was a shoemaker in 
Canterbury, with a somewhat numerous family. His first educa- 
tion was probably got at the endowed king's school, and he went 
to Cambridge (Benet College, Corpus Christi) in 1581. He is 
not recorded to have held a scholarship, and he may have owed 
his maintenance at college to a wealthy relative or other patron. 
He received the degree of M.A. in 1587, but before that he would 
seem to have renounced the sure prospects of the staid professions 
for the precarious career of actor and playwright. " Tamburlaine 
the Great " is inferred by Collier and Dyce to have been his first 
play, and to have been acted anterior to 1587, though not printed 
till 1590. None of his other plays were printed till after his 
death ; but Mr Dyce supposes them to have been produced in the 
following order — *'Faustus," "Jew of Malta," "Edward H.," 
"Massacre at Paris." He lost his life in 1593 in a miserable 
brawl. Among the papers left behind him were part of the 
tragedy of " Dido," afterwards completed by Nash ; a metrical 
paraphrase of part of Musseus's " Hero and Leander," afterwards 
continued by Chapman ; a translation of some of Ovid's Elegies ; 
and a translation into blank verse of the First Book of Lucan.^ 

Marlowe's life was brief and probably dissolute. We have no 
right to identify a dramatist with his characters, but it is impos- 
sible to disregard the combined evidences of his dramatic concep- 
tions and the accusations brought against him by more respectable 
contemporaries. His chief characters, Tamburlaine, Faustus, and 
the Jew of Malta, are not the creations of a calm mind ; their 

1 For the discussion of other works attributed to him see the ' Account of Mar- 
lowe and his writings' in Mr Dyce's edition, pp. Iviii.-lxvii. (1850); and Bell's 
Greene and Marlowe, p. 150 (1856). I adhere to Bell's remarks on the author- 
ship of " Lust's Dominion " and " The First Part of the Contention." If isolated 
coincidences of expression are taken as proof of authorship, almost any given 
play in the Elizabethan age might be assigned to any given author: the dramatists 
made so communistically free with the production of their fellows. In spite of its 
dealing with events subsequent to Marlowe's death, " Lust's Dominion " is, on the 
whole, much more like his work than " The First Part of the Contention." 



CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 233 

volcanic passions and daring scepticism are the offspring of a 
turbulent, vehement, irregular nature, bold and defiant of public 
opinion. Marlowe's alleged writings against the Trinity have never 
been seen ; in all probability, like some alleged infidel works of 
the Middle Ages, they never existed : but there seems no reason 
to doubt that he was, as his accusers stated, a man that neither 
feared God nor regarded man. Beauty, which he worshipped with 
passionate devotion, was the only sunshine of his life, and it shone 
with a burning fierceness proportioned to the violence of his 
tempestuous moods. The vision of Hero and Leander is a rapt 
surrender of the whole soul to impassioned meditation on luxuri- 
ous beauty. In his life as in his plays, such intervals of delight 
were probably rare. Tamburlaine is a most impassioned adorer of 
divine Zenocrate ; Faustus hangs in ecstatic worship on the lips of 
Helen ; but these are only brief transports in lives where energy 
and ambition are devouringly predominant. Marlowe's genius 
was little adapted to sonneteering and pastoral poetry : he stig- 
matized the fashionable love-lyrics as " egregious foppery," and 
derided them with rough ridicule. He wrote no sonnets ; only 
one pastoral song has been ascribed to him,^ and it is direct and 
fresh, a movement of impatient captivating sweetness, an impul- 
sive tone of invitation that will take no denial. Marlowe was 
a clear and powerful genius, and we often seem to catch in his 
poetry an undertone of almost angry contempt for commonplace. 
The most generally impressive of Marlowe's works is his frag- 
ment on the tale of Hero and Leander, and if we founded solely 
upon this, we should form most erroneous notions of his genius. 
We should suppose his worship of beauty, which was but a rare 
and transient passion, to have been the presiding force of his 
imagination. It is in his plays that we find the world of storm 
and strife wherein he delighted to expatiate, and a most Titanic 
world it is, immeasurably transcending nature in breadth and 
height of thought, feeling, and destructive energy ; a region where 
everything is on a gigantic scale, peopled with creatures that are 
monstrous in the largeness of their composition and the fierceness 
of their passions. "Tamburlaine the Great" was his first play, 
and serves as well as any other to give a notion of his grand 
manner. - Tamburlaine (better known as Timour the Tartar) is 
represented as a Scythian shepherd, whose ambition, fed by heav- 
enly portents and oracles, soars to the height of subduing the 
three continents : he aspires to spread his name 

1 The song of the " Passionate Shepherd to his Love " is ascribed to Marlowe 
in ' England's Helicon," but this is not conclusive, as pieces were not always given 
to their true authors in these miscellanies. The curious thing is, that in the " Pas- 
sionate Pilgrim," where it is given as Shakespeare's, all the staves would pass for 
his: but in E. H. two more staves are given that seem to be in Marlowe's distinc- 
tive vein. 



234 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 

" As far as Boreas claps his brazen wings, 
Or fair Bootes sends his cheerful light." ^ 

Theridamas, a Persian general, is sent to take the mad shepherd 
prisoner, but when he sets eyes on him he is seduced from his 
allegiance by miraculous fascination. He stands rooted to the 
earth, and exclaims : — 

"Tamburlaine ! a Scythian shepherd so embellished 
With Nature's pride and richest furniture ! 
His looks do menace Heaven and dare the gods; 
His fiery eyes are fixed upon the earth, 
As if he now devised some stratagem, 
Or meant to pierce Avernus' darksome vaults 
To pull the triple-headed dog from hell." 

When this tremendous being breaks silence, his speech is pregnant 
with sublime energy : — 

" Forsake thy king, and do but join with me, 
And we will triumph over all the world : 
I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains. 
And with my hand turn Fortune's wheel about; 
And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere 
Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome. 
Draw forth thy sword thou mighty man at arms. 
Intending but to raze my charmed skin, 
And Jove himself will stretch his arm from heaven 
To ward the blow, and shield me safe from harm." 

Tamburlaine's vaunts are justified by events : he soon gains the 
crown of Persia : then turns his arms against the countless legions 
of the Turks, subdues their emperor Bajazeth (whom he carries 
about in a cage, and uses upon occasion as a footstool), and 
bestows kingdoms upon his most eminent followers. Towards the 
end of the First Part of his eventful drama, he thus sums up his 
achievements : — 

"The god of war resigns his seat to me, 
Meaning to make me general of the world : 
Jove, viewing me in arms, looks pale and wan, 
Fearing my power should jiuU him from his throne: 
Where'er I come the Fatal Sisters sweat, 



1 This passage seems to be referred to in Nash's celebrated Epistle prefixed 
to Greene's " Menaphon," where he speaks of vainglorious tragedians who think 
themselves all right " if they once but get Boreas by the beard and the heavenly 
Bull by the dewlap." If so, this would confirm Mr Collier's opinion that Marlowe 
is the " idiot art^master " assailed in that connection, and cast some doubt on the 
propriety of M. Taine's taking Marlowe's plays as the standard of English taste in 
that age. 



CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 235 

And grisly Death, by running to and fro, 

To do their ceaseless homage to my sword : 

And here in Afric, where it seldom rains, 

Since I arrived with my triumphant host, 

Have swelling clouds, drawn from wide-gaping wounds, 

Been oft resolved in bloody purple showers, 

A meteor that might terrify the earth. 

And make it quake at every drop it drinks : 

Millions of souls sit on the banks of Styx, 

Waiting the back-return of Charon's boat; 

Hell and Elysium swarm with ghosts of men, 

That I have sent from sundry foughten fields, 

To spread my fame through hell and up to heaven." 

In the Second Part the poet's imagination expatiates in a still 
ampler range of extravagance. Two of the conqueror's sons dis- 
play their father's spirit. " Wading through blood to a throne " 
would be but a tame image to them. When their father talks 
of what must be the character of his successor, one of them says 
that, were the throne placed in a sea of blood, he would prepare 
a ship and sail to it ; and the other, with still greater hardihood, 
cries : — 

" And I would strive to swim through pools of blood. 
Or make a bridge of murdered carcases, 
Whose arches should be framed with bones of Turks, 
Ere I would lose the title of a king." 

His wife Zenocrate falling sick, he consoles himself with sublime 
fancies of the reception preparing for her in heaven : — 

" Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven 
As sentinels to warn th' immortal souls 
To entertain divine Zenocrate. 

The cherubins and holy seraphins 

That sing and play before the King of kings, 

Use all their voices and their instruments 

To entertain divine Zenocrate : 

And in this sweet and curious harmony. 

The god that tunes this music to our souls, 

Holds out his hand in highest majesty 

To entertain divine Zenocrate." 

His raving over her death is hardly less extravagant : — 

"What, is she dead? Techelles, draw thy sword. 
And wound the earth that it may cleave in twain. 
And we descend into the infernal vaults. 
To hale the Fatal Sisters by the hair, 
And throw them in the triple moat of hell, 
For taking hence my fair Zenocrate, 
Cassane and Theridamas, to arms ! 
Raise cavalieros higher than the clouds, 



236 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 

And with the cannon break the frame of heaven : 

Batter the shining palace of the sun 

And shiver all the starry firmament, 

For amorous Jove hath snatched my love from hence, 

Meaning to make her stately queen of heaven." 

Tamburlaine is, if possible, increased in fierceness by the death of 
his queen. He lays waste the town where she died with fire and 
sword : and proceeding in his irresistible career of conquest, har- 
nesses kings to his chariot, and stabs one of his own sons for 
effeminate shirking of war. His last exploit is the capture of 
Babylon. He binds the Babylonians hand and foot, and drowns 
man, woman, and child ; then burns the sacred books of Mahomet, 
daring the prophet, if he have any power, to come down and take 
vengeance. Immediately thereafter he is seized by a sudden and 
mysterious distemper. He maintains his sublime spirit to the last. 
He represents death as afraid to confront him eye to eye : — 

"See where my slave, the ugly monster Death, 
Shaking and quivering, pale and wan for fear, 
Stands aiming at me with his murdering dart, 
Who flies away at every glance I give, 
And, when I look away, comes stealing on ! " 

Yet once more, in spite of Death, he takes the field, and scatters 
his enemies " like summer's vapours vanished by the sun : " then 
calls for a map that he may trace the extent of his conquests, and 
see how much of the world remains to subdue ; commends the com- 
pletion of the triumph to his son; and bids his friends farewell — 

" For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die." 

It is not alone the inflated ambition and miraculous success of 
the hero, that raise and swell the effect of this play to dimensions 
so astounding. His chief followers and his chief enemies express 
themselves with hardly inferior energy ; and our minds are filled 
with amazement at the hundreds of thousands under various kings 
and emperors arrayed for and against the magnificent conqueror.^ 

"Tamburlaine" was Marlowe's first play, but the impetuous 
swell of his conceptions cannot be said to have been much moder- 
ated as he went on. His " raptures all air and fire " were not, I 
believe, the extravagance of youth ; still less could they have been, 

1 The resources of the scene-painter and the stage machinist were not then de- 
veloped. A board with a name upon it indicated the place of the action ; and 
supernatural personages descended and reascended only when the carpenter 
"could conveniently." But it seems probable that part of the success of 'Tam- 
burlaine ' was due to its spectacular effect, introducing as it did potentates in the 
costumes of their several regions. Greene and Peele seem to have taken the hint. 
Belinus and Abdelmelec may have invoked the aid of the Turkish emperor to afford 
an opportunity of exhibiting the gorgeous costumes of himself and his retinue of 
kings. 



CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 23/ 

as Mr Collier seems to think, the result of inexperience in blank 
verse, and mistaken effort to make up by bombastic terms for the 
absence of rhyme ; they were part of the constitution of this m- 
dividual man. It is impossible to say what he might have done 
had his life been longer : he might have exhausted this high as- 
tounding vein, and proved himself capable of opening up another. 
But as long as he lived he found fuel for his lofty raptures. He 
could not repeat another conqueror of the world, but his heroes are 
all expanded to the utmost possible limit of their circumstances. 
The Jew of Malta is an incarnation of the devil himself: he is no 
less universal in his war against all mankind that are within reach 
of his power : he fights single-handed with monstrous instruments of 
death against a whole city, and does not scruple to poison even his 
own daughter. Faustus is not a malevolent being, but his ambi- 
tion is even greater than Tamburlaine's ; he soars beyond the petty 
possibilities of humanity, leagues himself with superhuman powers 
and rides through space in a fiery chariot exploring the secrets of 
the universe. Even in his historical play of Edward II., where 
he is bound by the shackles of recent history more or less known 
to his audience, the conflict of explosive passions is superhuman 
in its energies ; the king's court is a hell ,of extravagant affection 
and fiendish spite, wanton tyranny and mutinous unapproachable 
fierceness — a den of wild beasts.^ 

It is sometimes said by way of superlative eulogy that the 
tracredy of Edward II. is worthy of Shakespeare. Such a notion 
could not be held for a moment by any one accustomed to draw 
distinctions among the objects of his admiration. The manner of 
Marlowe is as different as possible from the manner of Shakespeare. 
Not to enter into minute comparisons of expression, which, though 
somewhat tedious, is perhaps the most distinct way of conveying 
how radically they difl^er, it is sufficient to mention two great 
points of contrast, significant of the deepest differences of consti- 
tution Marlowe has very little humour, and very little sense of 
varied aspects of character. Shakespeare is said to have borrowed 
the idea of Richard II. from Marlowe's Edward II., and his Hot- 
spur from Marlowe's young Mortimer. Now, compare the concep- 
tions of the two dramatists. Edward and Richard agree only m 
being weak and wasteful kings, Mortimer and Hotspur in being 
irrepressible noblemen, with a natural delight in war. On the 
throne and in the dungeon Edward is more contemptible than 
Richard. Edward, indeed, is a spoiled child of Titamc breed : he 
has the infatuated loves and spites of a spoiled child ; and the 
cruel indignities put upon him after his dethronement seem aimed 

1 This would almost seem to be the original of M. Taine's conception of six- 
teenth-century England. 



238 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 

in contempt at his effeminacy. He clings to Gaveston as to a for- 
bidden toy. When his nobles stalk defiantly from his presence 
and leave him to storm in monologue, he takes revenge by bullying 
his wife. In the true spirit of a wayward child, he loads Gaveston 
with honours to spite the fractious noblemen : he affirms that he 
cares for the throne only as a means of indulging his favourite. 
Shakespeare's Richard II. is a very different being. He is said 
to be wasteful and given to favouritism : but in all his appearances 
upon the stage he comports himself with royal dignity. The faults 
that work his overthrow are impetuous indiscretion and a greater 
love for Fine Arts than the duties of government. His reverses 
turn upon a much finer pivot than Edward's gross abuse of power : 
he might have kept his throne had he not on a random impulse 
stopped the combat between Bolii>gbroke and Mowbray, and sent 
them both into banishment : — 

"O when the king did throw his warder down, 
His own life hung upon the staff he threw." 

Richard's death is heroic ; and his reflections in the dungeon may 
be contrasted with Gaveston's schemes for the amusement of 
Edward, as showing the higher reach of his philosophic and 
artistic culture.- A close comparison of Mortimer and Hotspur 
reveals still more striking dissimilarities. Mortimer is outspoken 
and delights in war like Hotspur, but he shows no trace of the 
amiable qualities of Harry Percy. He is actuated by a coarse 
ambition to marry the queen and seize the throne, and is the 
author of the gross cruelty wreaked upon the helpless king. 
Harry Percy is presented in more varied as well as more amiable 
lights. He chafes and " chaffs " Glendower with impudence 
privileged by its happy audacity. He is wrapt up in warlike 
schemes : he gives playful evasive answers to his wife's questions ; 
sometimes he is so preoccupied that he does not answer till an 
hour afterwards. He is fondly beloved by his Kate : while he is 
alive, he is her " mad ape," her " paraquito," a dear provoking 
fellow ; and when he dies, her noble eulogy of his chivalrous 
nature shows how deep was his hold of her affections. To his 
rival Hal, his overpowering devotion to war sometimes appears a 
little comical ; but his courage and prowess receive all deference 
and honour. Of all those traits that give Harry Percy individual 
life, there is not the faintest prefiguration in Marlowe's young 
Mortimer. Character - painting, indeed, was not in Marlowe's 
way : his personages do not show many-sided character in their 
different relations. All his creations relax under the charms of 
love, and express themselves with glowing affection ; but they all 
relax and warm into raptures very much after the same fashion. 
There is no such discrimination in Marlowe as the distinction 



CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 239 

between the wooing of Troilus and the wooing of Diomede, not to 
speak of finer distinctions. Even Edward's love for Gaveston and 
the Jew's love for his daughter flow into the same current of 
language as Tamburlaine's love for Zenocrate, and Faustus's 
admiration of Helen. 

The fragment of "Hero and Leander" is incomparably the 
finest product of Marlowe's genius : it is one of the chief treasures 
of the language. The poet is fairly intoxicated with the beauty 
of his subject : he has thought about the two lovers, and dreamed 
about them, and filled his imagination with their charms; he 
writes with ecstasy as if obeying an impulse that he can resist no 
longer, and in every other line expressions escape him that have 
all the warmth of involuntary bursts of admiration. He dashes 
into the subject with passionate eagerness, outlining the situation 
with a few impatient strokes, and at once proceeding to descant 
on the beauty of Hero : — 

" On Hellespont, guilty of true lovers' blood, 
In view and opposite two cities stood, 
Sea-borderers, disjoined by Neptune's might; 
The one Abydos, the other Sestos hight. 
At Sestos Hero dwelt; Hero the fair, 
Whom young Apollo courted for her hair, 
And offered as a dower his burning throne 
Where she should sit for men to gaze upon. 

Some say for her the fairest Cupid pined, 

And looking in her face was strooken blind. 

But this is true; so like was one the other, 

As he imagined Hero was his mother; 

And oftentimes into her bosom flew, 

About her naked neck his bare arms threw, 

And laid his childish head upon ber breast. 

And with still panting rock, there took his rest. 

So lovely fair was Hero, Venus' nun, 

As Nature wept thinking she was undone. 

Because she took more from her than she left. 

And of such wondrous beauty her bereft : 

Therefore in sign her treasure suffered wrack. 

Since Hero's time hath half the world been black." 

From Hero he passes to Leander — 

" Amorous Leander, beautiful and young, 
Whose tragedy divine Musoeus sung, 
Dwelt at Abydos; since him dwelt there none 
For whom succeeding times make greater moan." 

Leander's beauty is painted in even more glowing colours than 
Hero's. In his picture of the infatuated doting of Edward H. 
on Piers Gaveston, Marlowe had already shown that he understood 



240 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 

the passion that may be felt for the beauty of young men, and 
here we have a stronger evidence. He describes Leander with 
something Hke a Greek feehng for his beauties, his arms, his 
smooth breast, his white shoulder, his orient cheeks and lips : 
some of the particulars would seem to have been adopted by 
Shakespeare and applied to the praise of his beautiful friend. 
The poem as a whole is more voluptuous and earnestly im- 
passioned in sentiment than Shakespeare's corresponding poem 
of "Venus and Adonis " : the poet did not live to carry the tale 
into its tragic stage. 

III. — Robert Greene (1560-1592). 

To class Greene among the dramatists is rather a harsh measure 
for his reputation, although the arrangement is justified by his 
relations with the stage. When Shakespeare began to write, Mar- 
lowe and Greene were the most firmly established playwrights, and 
both himself and his friends testify to the eagerness of rival mana- 
gers to obtain the hastiest of Greene's performances. Yet Greene's 
plays are by no means the best fruits of his pen. He began his 
literary career as an author of love-tales or novels in prose inter- 
spersed with songs and lyrics : and as he had a most rich and 
vivid feeling for colour, and a fine ear for the music of verse, these 
occasional pieces are by far his best productions. If, therefore, we 
were to estimate him by quality rather than by quantity, we should 
place him rather among the love-poets than among the dramatists. 
As a dramatist he was a follower of Lyly and Marlowe : as a 
writer of pastoral lyrics he was Marlowe's predecessor and superior. 

The earliest production of Greene's hitherto discovered is 
" Mamillia," an imitation to a certain extent of Lyly's " Euphues," 
published in 1583, while the author was in residence at Clare 
Hall, Cambridge, just before taking the degree of M.A. He had 
come up from Norwich to St John's, and had graduated B.A. in 
1578 : after that, though his father would not seem to have been 
a rich man, he found means to travel in Spain, Italy, and other 
parts of the Continent. According to his own account, written in 
deathbed repentance, he had learnt in Italy luxurious, profligate, 
and abominable habits, and on his return soon exhausted both his 
money and his credit, and was at his wits' end for a suitable pro- 
fession. After vacillating for a little between the Church and 
Physic, he finally gravitated to the last resort of such unsteady 
spirits — ''became an author of plays and a penner of love-pam- 
phlets." " Mamillia " was rapidly followed by a host of other love- 
pamphlets : " Morando," " Menaphon," " Perimedes the Black- 
smith," " Pandosto, the Triumph of Time " (reprinted by Mr 
Collier as the foundation of the "Winter's Tale"), "Philomela, 



ROBERT GREENE. 24I 

the Lady Fitzwater's Nightingale " (reprinted along with "Mena- 
phon " in Brydges' " Archaica "), and many others. These euphu- 
istically embellished tales were the fashionable reading of ladies 
on their first appearance, and afterwards went through many edi- 
tions, to the delight of sentimental maids in humbler life. Greene's 
fertility is all the more amazing when we consider the debauched 
life that he led : we need not wonder at his early death when we 
see how he burnt the candle at both ends — hard work and im- 
moderate dissipation. Five of his plays have come down to us : 
"Orlando Furioso " (published 1594); '^ Looking-Glass for Lon- 
don and England" (1594, written in conjunction with Lodge) ; 
" Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay " (1594); "James the Fourth" 
(1598); "Alphonsus, King of Arragon " (1599). "George-a- 
Green, the Pinner of Wakefield " (1599), is also attributed to him. 

Greene saw a great deal of villanous company during his brief 
career in London. His own excuse for his choice of depraved 
associates was that he wished to paint their manners. It is not 
impossible that this was part of his motive for consorting with 
rogues and sharpers : it may even have been the apology that he 
offered to his own conscience. Yet with all allowances for his 
thus stooping to gain professional ends, we shall probably not be 
fiir wrong if we accept Mr Dyce's conclusion, that of all " the 
Muse's sons whose vices have conducted them to shame and sor- 
row, none, perhaps, have sunk to deeper degradation and misery." 
We must not be prejudiced against Greene because he assailed 
the youthful Shakespeare so bitterly, nor must we take Gabriel 
Harvey's picture as accurate in every particular. But it seems 
indisputable that Greene reduced himself to extreme distress by 
extravagant profligacy ; that he spent recklessly, and was not over- 
scrupulous in replenishing his colfers ; and that in his struggle for 
the means of debauchery he was bitterly jealous and envious of all 
literary competitors. Marlowe as well as Shakespeare had been 
an object of attack when he began his career of playwright : he was 
seemingly attacked in Nash's preface to Greene's " Menaphon," 
and afterwards his " Tamburlaine " and its blank verse were 
directly sneered at by Greene himself. Indeed, Greene confessed 
in his repentant fit that he could not keep a friend : he behaved 
to his friends in such a way as to turn them into utter enemies. 

It seems possible to trace the reaction from this intemperate 
life of debauchery, hard work, and bitterness, in the passionate 
beauty of Greene's lyrics : one can understand with what a trans- 
port of relief he would throw himself out of his base surroundings 
into the dreams of a happy pastoral country and the music of 
sweet verse. There is nothing in his dramas to suggest the prof- 
ligacy of the author. They are of the nature of comedies : they 
terminate happily, and in accordance with the strictest principles 



242 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 

of morality. His heroines — Angelica, the fair maid of Fressing- 
field, Dorothea, Isabel — are models of moral no less than of 
physical beauty. 

On the whole, Greene seems to have been a clever ready-witted 
fellow, with a gift of sweet song, and unbounded facility in the 
use of words : bold, shameless, somewhat cynical and bitter : pre- 
pared to write to the utmost of his ability in any vein that would 
sell : a boisterous reveller, incapable of foregoing a rough joke 
even at the expense of his dearest friend. This was the man as he 
appeared to his fellows. But he would seem to have had an inner 
life of remorseful fits, abject in proportion to the intemperate 
height of his orgies. If indeed we had no authority beyond his 
" Repentance " and his " Groat's Worth of Wit " we might easily 
believe these to have been written for the sole purpose of replen- 
ishing his purse. But there are trustworthy accounts of his death- 
bed behaviour, when his "jolly long red peak" and "well-propor- 
tioned body " were finally prostrated ; and these accounts lead us 
to believe that his repentance was unfeigned. And, indeed, the 
tone of his plays, and his delight in the imagination of beauty, 
innocence, and country joys, are indications of a better nature that 
lay hid under poor Robert's outer profligacy. 

Greene has no claim to high rank as a dramatist, and yet he 
deserves considerable study as a precursor of Shakespeare. Al- 
though his blank verse is somewhat monotonous, yet there is 
incisive and vivid energy in his language : and he had probably 
more influence than Marlowe in forming or enriching Shakespeare's 
diction. Take at random, as an illustration, the induction to Act 
ii. of " Alphonsus " — 

" Thus from the pit of pilgrim's poverty 
Alphonsus 'gins by step and step to climb 
Unto the top of friendly Fortune's wheel. 
From banished state, as you have plainly seen, 
He is transform'd into a soldier's life, 
And marcheth in the ensign of the King 
Of worthy Naples, which Belinus hight; 
Not for because that he doth love him so, 
But that he may revenge him on his foe. 
Now on the top of lusty barbed steed 
He mounted is, in glittering armour clad, 
Seeking about the troops of Arragon, 
For to encounter with his traitorous niece. 
How he doth speed and what doth him befall, 
Mark this our act, for it doth show it all." 

The versification of this is exceedingly flat, but here and there are 
touches of vivid expression. The opening of this Act is energetic, 
reminding us of Gloucester's " Down, down to hell, and say I sent 
thee thither." Alphonsus kills Flaminius, and exclaims — 



ROBERT GREENE. 243 

" Go, pack thee hence unto the Stygian lake, 
And make report unto thy traitorous sire 
How well thou hast enjoyed the diadem 
Which he by treason set upon thy head; 
And if he ask thee who did send thee down, 
Alphonsus say, who now must wear thy crown." 

Greene is sometimes accused of ranting. The chief basis for 
this accusation is the character of Rasni, King of Nineveh, in the 
" Looking-Glass for London and England." This " Imperial 
swaggerer," as Campbell calls him, is puffed up with immeasur- 
able pride till the prophet Jonah lets the wind out of him ; and 
glories in a strain somewhat hke Tamburlaine, but more like the 
conventional Herod of the Mysteries : — 

" Great Jewry's God, that foiled stout Benhadad, 
Could not rebate the strength that Rasni brought; 
For be he God in heaven, yet, viceroys, know, 
Rasni is god on earth and none but he." 

It should be remarked, however, that this play was written by 
Greene in conjunction with Lodge, and that Greene's portion of 
the work was probably the delineation of the extortion, roguery, 
and debauchery of Nineveh, which was to say, of London. The 
particulars of the sumptuous wedding, indeed, are quite in Greene's 
style ; he was at home in the exercise of accumulating gorgeous 
particulars. But there is nothing to approach the extravagant 
inflation of Rasni in any play of Greene's sole workmanship. He 
essayed a counterpart to Tamburlaine in his Alphonsus, and there 
had ample opportunity for unbounded rant ; but Alphonsus bears 
his exploits lightly, and indulges but sparingly in the swelling 
utterance of aspiration and triumph. Greene w^as too cynical to 
have command of language for a character of sustained pride ; he 
could pump up expression for a good many emotions, but his 
nature was dry in that region. He is, indeed, a standing refuta- 
tion of the plausible idea that rant belongs to the infancy of the 
drama. Rant goes rather with the nature of the individual ; and 
Greene, with all his roughness and recklessness, was fitted to be 
the pupil of Lyly more than of Marlowe. 

Like most of his predecessors, from Chaucer downwards, Greene 
makes frequent use of the goddesses and celebrated beauties of 
Grecian mythology for purposes of comparison. But he does more 
than merely repeat the names, saying that a heroine Is as fair as 
Helen or as faithful as Penelope : he evidently exerted his imagi- 
nation to conceive them in a certain visual semblance of beauty. 
We are not, of course, to suppose that he had any notion of con- 
ceiving classical beauty as different from English beauty : when 
he spoke of the port of Juno and the foot of Thetis, he probably 



244 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 

had in his mind's eye a gait and an instep that had charmed him 
in the neighbourhood of St Paul's. Still, he had the notion of 
giving life to dead names. He had also the notion of conceiving 
these antique paragons at supreme moments in their history when 
their charms were at full height. Semele, Chloris, Daphne, Thetis, 
and others, are taken at the moment when their beauty proved 
irresistible even to the gods : Venus at the moment of her highest 
triumph. Amurack exclaims of his wife Fausta — 

" Behold the gem and jewel of mine age ! 
See where she comes, whose heavenly majesty 
Doth far surpass the brave and gorgeous pace 
Which Cytherea, daughter unto Jove, 
Did put in ure whenas she had obtained 
The gulden apple at the shepherd's hands." 

This vein of classical allusion is one of the outcomes of Greene's 
passion for beautiful forms and colours. It is carried out to a 
weakness in his dramas, rendering him peculiarly open to the 
charge made at the time against University poets generally — he 
" smacks too much of Ovid." He sadly violates dramatic pro- 
priety by ascribing an acquaintance with the Roman poet to all 
his characters indiscriminately. Even lovely Peggy, the keeper's 
daughter at Fressingfield, can discourse of Phoebus courting lovely 
Semele, of the matchless hue of Helen, of the scrolls that Jove 
sent to Danae ; she puts up an appeal to " fond Ate, doomer of 
bad-boding fates ; " and says with enthusiasm that Lacy is 

" Proportioned as was Paris when, in gray, 
He courted tEnon in the vale of Troy." 

If, however, we wish to see Greene at his best, we must go to 
the occasional songs in his prose tales. ^ We might, indeed, com- 
pile from his plays a florilegium of pretty lines, such as — 

"Thou gladsome lamp that wait'st on Phoebus' train, 
Spreading thy kindness through the jarring orbs, 
That in their union praise thy lasting powers; 
Fair pride of morn, sweet beauty of the even ! " 



Or 



" Sleep like the smiling purity of heaven. 
When mildest wind is loath to blend the peace." 



But a collection of his lyrics — songs, roundelays, jigs, sonettos, 
madrigals, ditties, and odes — is really like his own Cuba, a region 
enriched 

" With favours sparkling from the smiling heavens." 



1 These are reprinted in Bell's Poets, along with "Hero and Leander" — a 
charming volume. 



ROBERT GREENE. 245 

Very often he rounds off in a few lines a perfect subject for the 
painter,^ as in the burden of Sephestia's song to her child — 

" Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee; 
When thou art old there's grief enough for thee." 

Or the opening lines of Menaphon's roundelay — 

" When tender ewes, brought home with evening sun, 
Wend to their folds. 
And to their holds 
The shepherds trudge when light of day is done." 

In the tales these verses come in as if the author's thoughts were 
tired of their prose vehicle, and spontaneously and irresistibly 
blossomed into song. His excellence in short verses, or in a 
capricious mixture of short verses with long, is a curious contrast 
to the baldness and monotony of his blank verse : it surprises us 
as when an indifferent walker proves a light and graceful runner. 
There is nothing in any of his plays to suggest a possibility of such 
as the following : — 

" Ah, what is love? It is a pretty thing. 
As sweet unto a shepherd as a king ; 

And sweeter too. 
For kings have cares that wait upon a crown, 
And cares can make the sweetest love to frown : 

Ah then, ah then. 
If country loves such sweet desires do gain, 
What lady would not love a shepherd swain ? 

His flocks are folded, he comes home at night, 
As merry as a king in his delight; 

And merrier too, 
For kings bethink them what the state require, 
Where shepherds careless carol by the fire : 

Ah then, ah then, 
If country loves such sweet desires do gain, 
What lady would not love a shepherd swain?" 

In more regular and even measures, Greene is comparatively 
stiff and restrained. One of his longest poems, which contains 
passages equal to his best, is printed in the ' Phoenix Nest,' with 
the title " A most Rare and Excellent Dream, learnedly set down 
by a worthy gentleman, a brave scholar, and M. of Arts in both 
universities." It has not been identified as Greene's by Mr Dyce 
or Mr Bell ; but the title, taken in conjunction with the style, 
may be considered conclusive evidence. The measure is the 
seven-hne stave of Troilus verse. 

1 Since this was written, Mr Gosse has suggested that Greene's sense of colour 
was probably cultivated by the study of Italian paintings, which he might have seen 
during his travels. 



246 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 

IV. — George Peele (1558-1598). 

Peele was a few years older than either Marlowe or Greene, and 
had published a rhymed play before Marlowe began to write, but 
we place him after these two, because he probably followed them 
as a writer for the public stage. He was a gentleman by birth, 
took the degree of M.A. at Oxford (Broadgates Hall, now Pem- 
broke College) in 1579, and possessed some land in right of his 
wife : but, eschewing the steady professions, he went up to London 
in 1 58 1, and soon became known as one of the authors whose liv- 
ing was gained by their wits. He was a conspicuous figure in the 
same dissipated circle as Marlowe and Greene : and acquired such 
notoriety as a profligate wit that a body of ' Merry Conceited 
Jests ' ^ was fathered upon him — apparently without much mis- 
take of paternity. 

The plays attributed to Peele in Mr Dyce's edition are " The 
Arraignment of Paris" (1584, a rhymed play, written for private 
representation before the Queen by the children of the Chapel) ; 
"The Chronicle History of Edv/ard I." (1593) ; "The Battle of 
Alcazar" (1594) ; "The Old Wives' Tales" (1595, supposed to be 
the basis of Milton's " Comus ") ; " David and Bethsabe " (1599, 
the best of Peele's Plays) ; " Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes " 
(1599). He was frequently employed to devise pageants, and 
several of these have been preserved. He wrote also a poem in 
heroic couplets, " The Tale of Troy," and various miscellaneous 
poems. His extant works are not so numerous as Greene's ; and 
he would seem to have been a much less productive writer. His 
literary career was twice as long as Greene's. In the ' Jests ' we 
are told that " George was of the poetical disposition, never to 
write so long as his money lasted : " and if we may trust that 
authority, he had many madcap and unscrupulous ways of " raising 
the wind," from nominal borrowing to downright cozenage. 

Peele was a man of softer and subtler make than Greene : a 
handsome person with a thin womanish voice ; of light and nimble 
fancy, and smooth ingenious execution : without the faintest desire 
to use honest means in procuring a livelihood. Poor Greene was 
not very scrupulous, but he thought it necessary to justify his 
keeping company with blackguards ; he worked hard, advocated 
high morality, and suffered occasional visitations of conscience. 
Peele's choice of subjects does not betray any stifled morality in 
him. The most marked hint of the writer's personality appears 
in the ingenuity of his compliments direct and' indirect to his 
audience. The denotiement of "The Arraignment of Paris " is an 
audacious compliment to Elizabeth. The idea is that the judg- 

1 " Jest" meaning practical j'oie. 



GEORGE PEELE. 24/ 

ment of Paris is called in question, as being unjust and partial ; 
Paris is arraigned before a council of the gods ; the matter is 
referred to the arbitration of Diana ; and she, to keep the peace 
of Olympus, awards the apple to Elizabeth, a peerless nymph, a 
paragon, as stately as Juno, as wise as Minerva, as lovely as 
Venus, and as chaste as Diana herself.^ His two chronicle histo- 
ries had a large adventitious interest for the time, as gratifying 
the prevaihng English hatred of Spain and Popery. Elinor, the 
Spanish queen of Edward I., is represented as a monster of cru- 
elty and pride : and Stukely, the hera of the " Battle of Alcazar," 
is a renegade Englishman, commissioned by the Pope to raise a 
rebellion in Ireland. Most Elizabethan dramatists paid incidental 
comphments to Elizabeth, and to their country : Peele seems to 
have deliberately aimed at securing patronage by making whole 
plays a bolus of flattery. Spenser's ' Faery Queen ' and Lyly's 
'• Midas " as well as his " Endymion," were also designed to flatter 
Elizabeth ; but Spenser and Lyly used a decorous veil of allegory. 
It pleased the erratic Nash to commend Peele in 1587 "as the 
chief supporter of pleasance now living, the Atlas of poetry, and 
primus verborinn ^r/Z/^jt:," — " chief engineer of phrases." This 
was in opposition to Marlowe. Posterity has certainly reversed 
this haphazard judgment as regards the general power of the rival 
poets : it is universally allowed that " Marlowe had a far more 
powerful intellect than Peele, and a far deeper insight into the 
human heart" — was, in short, a poet of immeasurably higher 
order. On the matter of skill in blank verse, Campbell and Mr 
Payne Collier are at variance. Campbell spoke strongly in favour 
of Peele : " There is no such sweetness of versification and imagery 
to be found in our blank verse anterior to Shakespeare." Mr 
Collier ascribes this honour to Marlowe, pointing out the fact that 
Peele did not write a complete play in blank verse till Marlowe 
had set the example, and declaring his best blank verse to be for 
the most part monotonous. Mr CoUier is too truculent on this 
point of versification. The general strain of the two poets is so 
very diflerent, that one cannot decide the question by counting 
their pauses and their trochaic and monosyllabic endings. The 
versification of " David and Bethsabe " is undoubtedly sweet. 
Blank verse would not have been suitable for " The Arraignment 
of Paris," a piece moving with almost pantomimic gaiety. Peele 
acted with judgment in reserving blank verse for the formal 
orations of Paris and Diana. 

The occasional ranting in "Edward I.," and the prevaihng 

1 Udall paid a similar compliment to Anne Boleyn in 1532, representing that 
the golden apple was not worthy of her; and a Mr Pownd repeated it for the 
gratification of Elizabeth in 1566; but these did not carry it to the extent of 
making it the aim of an entire play. 



248 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 

extravagance of the " Battle of Alcazar," are remarkable as 
coining from the same pen as "The Arraignment of Paris" and 
" David and Bethsabe." I can hardly believe that the bombast 
of Muly Mahamet — whom even more than Tamburlaine Shake- 
speare had in his eye in the burlesque of Pistol — was a serious 
expression according to the author's notions of art : we reconcile 
it with Peele's character only by supposing it to have been an 
audacious experiment in rivalry of the heroics of Tamburlaine. 
It seems to have succeeded. The incident burlesqued in " Feed 
and grow fat, my fair Calipolis," was specially famous. The Moor, 
Muly Mahamet, with his wife Calipolis and his son, are fleeing 
before the army of Abdelmelec, when Calipolis grows faint from 
hunger. Muly rushes off the stage shouting — "Famine shall pine 
to death, and thou shalt live ; " and re-enters with a piece of flesh 
upon his sword — 

" Hold thee, Calipolis, feed, and faint no more; 
This flesh I forced from a lioness, 
Meat of a princess, for a princess meet : 

Feed, then, and faint not, fair Calipolis; 
For rather than fierce famine shall prevail 
To gnaw thy entrails with her thorny teeth, 
The conquering lioness shall attend on thee. 

Jove's stately bird with wide-commanding wings 
Shall hover still about thy princely head, 
And beat down fowl by shoals into thy lap; 
Feed, then, and faint not, fair Calipolis." 

This incident struck the popular fancy very much like Tam- 
burlaine's entrance in a car of gold drawn by two kings with bits 
in their mouths ; and offered a bright mark for Shakespeare's 
ridicule. Pistol's strong language about the Furies, Pluto's 
damned lake, Erebus, and tortures vile also, seems to be founded 
on passages in the same play. In the explanation of the dumb- 
show before Act I. we find the following : — 

" Till Nemesis, high mistress of revenge. 
That with her scourge keeps all the world in awe, 
With thundering drum awakes the God of War, 
And calls the Fuines from Avernus' crags, 
To range, and rage, and vengeance to inflict, 
Vengeance on this accursed Moor for sin." 

In the dumb-show before Act II. Nemesis again uses her drum, 
and — 

" 'Larums aloud into Alecto's ears. 

And with her thundering wakes whereas they lie 

In cave as dark as hell and beds of steel, 

The Furies, just imps of dire revenge." 



GEORGE PEELE. 249 

In Act I. Muly Mahamet Seth exclaims — 

" Sheath not your swords, soldiers of Amurath, 
Sheath not your swords, you Moors of Barbary, 
That fight in right of your anointed king, 
But follow to the gates of death and hell, 
Pale death and hell, to entertain his soul; 
Follow, I say, to burning Phlegethon, 
This traitor-tyrant and his companies." 

Muly Mahamet himself ends off Act IV. with an apostrophe to 
the Furies, and a mad frenzy of imprecation : — 

" You bastards of the Night and Erebus, 

Fiends, Furies, hags that fight in beds of steel, 
Range through this army with your iron whips. 

And lastly for revenge, for deep revenge. 
Whereof thou goddess and deviser art. 
Damned let him be, damned, and condemned to bear 
All torments, tortures, plagues, and pains of hell." 

We see in these passages where Pistol may have caught his 
trick of repeating emphatic words. The facetious Peele in all 
hkelihood piled up these agonies for popular effect with hardly less 
sense of their ludicrous extravagance than Shakespeare himself. 

In strange contrast to these mad explosions are the rich fancy 
and tender feeling of '' David and Bethsabe " and the dehcate 
airy wit of "The Arraignment of Paris." Campbell has quoted 
the finest passage in " David and Bethsabe," but the following is 
not much inferior. It is David's exclamation at the sight of 
Bethsabe approaching in obedience to his summons : — 

" Now comes my lover tripping like the roe, 
And brings my longings tangled in her hair. 
To joy her love I'll build a kingly bower, 
Seated in hearing of a hundred streams, 
That for their homage to her sovereign looks, 
Shall, as the serpents fold into their nests 
In oblique turnings, wind their nimble waves 
About the circles of her curious walks; 
And with their murmur summon easeful sleep 
I To lay his golden sceptre on her brows." 

■ The following is also a sweet picture, although, perhaps, the 

j sweetness is too surfeiting : — 

" The time of year is pleasant for your grace. 
And gladsome summer in her shady robes 
Crowned w4th roses and with painted flowers, 
With all her nymphs shall entertain my lord, 
That, from the thicket of my verdant groves, 
Will sprinkle honey-dews about his breast, 
And cast sweet balm upon his kingly head." 



250 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 

The sprightly art of the " Arraignment " would seem but stale 
in a quotation. The most elaborate joke in it seems intended to 
ridicule the amorous pining of Spenser's ' Shepherd's Calendar.' 
Colin is introduced bewailing the cruelty of Love, and com- 
miserated by his friends Hobinol, Diggon, and Thenot : shortly 
afterwards his hearse is brought in, and shepherds sing welladay 
over his untimely death. His sweetheart l^hestylis woos and is 
rejected by a " foul crooked churl." Our knowledge of the 
personal jealousies and friendships of the period is imperfect and 
perplexing ; but it is probable that the " Palin " whom Spenser 
mentions in Colin Clout as " envying at his rustic quill " was 
George Peele, and that this was the expression of the envy. 



V. — Thomas Nash (i 558-1 600?). 

Marlowe's unfinished tragedy of " Dido " was completed by 
Thomas Nash ; and though this clever writer is memor^le chiefly 
as a prose satirist, yet his name will always be remembered most 
naturally in connection with his poetical associates, Greene, Mar- 
lowe, Lodge, and Peele. Nash was educated at Cambridge, which 
he seems to have left in some disgrace, and his first essay in print 
was the dashing critical preface to Greene's " Menaphon " in 1587. 
A clever harum-scarum fellow, with a quick sense of the ludi- 
crous, and an unsparing tongue, he found admirable scope for his 
powers in replying to the Martin Marprelate tracts, which he did 
in some four or five different pamphlets in and about the year 
1589. In the same year he opened up a vein of general prose 
satire in his * Anatomy of Absurdity,' a general attack on what- 
ever struck him as ridiculous in contemporary literature and 
manners — ranging consequently within a wide circle. In 1592 
he continued his exercitations in this vein with ' Pierce Penniless, 
his Supphcation to the Devil.' But meantime he had become in- 
volved in a quarrel with Gabriel Harvey, the friend of Spenser, 
and his brothers, of which a full account is given in D'Israeli's 
* Quarrels of Authors.' The original cause of Nash's ire seems to 
have been the offensive conceit of Richard Harvey, who in the 
Marprelate controversy had tried " to play Jack of both sides," 
sneering at all parties to the dispute, and had repeated the offence 
in a subsequent publication, in which he went the length of term- 
ing all poets and writers about London " piperly make-plays and 
make-baits." Nash was thoroughly in his element in taking up 
such a taunt. Throughout the various pamphlets of the cele- 
brated logomachy, he seems never to lose for a moment his feeling 
of complete and easy mastery over his opponent, writing always 
with good-humoured assurance of victory, and with the unsparing 



THOMAS KYD. 25 I 

derision of one who fears no retort. In the opening of his 
' Strange News,' a reply to Harvey's attack on the deceased 
Greene, he bids the Lord have mercy on poor Gabriel, for he 
is fallen into hands that will plague him. Harvey's poetical pre- 
tensions, and, above all, his hexameters, are ridiculed in this 
pamphlet with wonderful spirit and direct freshness and copious- 
ness of language. It confirms Nash's protestations that the 
quarrel was none of his seeking, to find him in his ' Christ's 
Tears over Jerusalem,' a religious and moral performance strangely 
different from the writer's previous effusions, making certain over- 
tures towards reconciliation. These overtures being rejected, he 
returned with redoubled incisiveness to his former ways of warfare, 
which continued till the mouths of the antagonists were shut by the 
intervention of the scandalised Government. 

Nash was imprisoned in 1597 for his share in a play called the 
" Isle of Dogs," which has not been preserved. " Summer's Last 
Will and Testament " is the only play of his that has come down 
to us. It is of the nature of a Masque, in which the seasons are 
the prominent figures ; was written for representation on the 
private stage of some nobleman, whose name is unknown, and was 
acted in 1592, though not published till 1600. On the whole it 
is a somewhat dull production, as the author himself seems to 
have felt. Frantic efforts are made to say witty and pretty things 
about the seasons, and to deliver striking saws about miscellaneous 
objects, dogs and drunkards, bookish theorists, and misanthropists. 
The best part of it is the song quoted in Palgrave's Treasury. 
Nash has no marked dramatic talent. His forte lay in what Mr 
Collier calls " humorous objurgation " : he throws himself into that 
vein with a sad want of continence, but with unflagging vivacity, 
and unfailing copiousness both of words and of conceptions. He 
tried also a tale — " Jack Wilton " — but did not succeed : he 
never is anything except when in the full swing of harum-scarum 
raillery. 

VI. —Thomas Kyd. (?) 

The author of " Jeronimo " (produced in 1588) and its con- 
tinuation "The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is mad again," 
belongs to the " robustious " school of rampant heroism. Ben 
Jonson's caUing him the "sportive Kyd" is a joke. Kyd, how- 
ever, possesses merits and a character of his own. In direct and 
vivid energy of language, in powerful antithesis of character, and 
in skilful and effective construction of plot, in the chief qualities 
that make a good acting play, "The Spanish Tragedy " will bear 
comparison with the best work of any of Shakespeare's predeces- 
sors. That it passed through more editions than perhaps any play 



252 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 

of the Elizabethan age is not at all surprising ; it offered many 
points for ridicule to the wits of the time, but its unflagging inter- 
est and strong emotions of pity and suspense went straight to the 
popular heart. 

The prominence of " Hieronimo " in the public mind is shown 
by the mention made of it in Jonson's " Cynthia's Revels," the 
" Return from Parnassus," Thomas May's " Heir," and other writ- 
ings of the time. A less obtrusive evidence — but more compli- 
mentary to Kyd if it arose from choice and not from necessity — 
is the fact of Shakespeare's familiarity with the play, as proved by 
numerous echoes and adaptations of its phraseology and its 
situations. 

One remarkable point in the plot of this double play is the 
breadth and scope of the action. Lorenzo, an antitype of lago, 
plans the murder of his brother-in-law Andrea, and the dishon- 
our of his sister Belimperia. Jeronimo and his son Horatio, the 
friend of Andrea, become aware of the plot, and write to Andrea 
warning him of his danger. Were the villain at this point to 
be exposed and the intended victim preserved for a happy life, 
or were all the principal personages to perish tragically, the action 
of the play would still be of ordinary breadth. But this is only 
half of the action of the First Part of Jeronimo. Jeronimo's letter 
never reaches Andrea, and Lorenzo's plot miscarries by an ingeni- 
ously conceived accident ; yet, after all, the man whose assassina- 
tion was arranged is dishonourably killed in battle by the myr- 
midons of Balthazar, the young prince of Portugal, and the 
First Part ends with Andrea's ghost bequeathing to Horatio the 
duty of revenge. In the Second Part, a marriage is contrived 
between Balthazar, who has been taken prisoner, and Belimperia 
the widow of Andrea. She loathes him and falls in love with 
Horatio. Horatio, the appointed revenger of Andrea's death, 
is hanged in his father's garden by Lorenzo and Balthazar. This 
takes place in the first two Acts. The remaining three are occu- 
pied with Hieronimo's madness at the loss of his only son, partly 
real, partly feigned. Like Hamlet, he is not at first certain of 
the murderers, and even when he discovers them indubitably, he 
bides his time. At last he hits upon the scheme of represent- 
ing a play before the Court, and procuring that the actors be 
Lorenzo, Balthazar, Belimperia, and himself. They kill in earnest 
where they should kill but in jest : Belimperia stabs Balthazar, 
whose servants had killed her husband, and then stabs herself; 
Hieronimo stabs Lorenzo, the murderer of his son, then makes a 
speech disclosing to the horrified Court the " realism " of the play, 
and hangs himself. 



HENRY CHETTLE. 253 

VII. — Anthony Munday (1553-162-?). 

Munday is known to have been employed in fourteen plays 
between 1597 and 1603, and he was probably a constant writer 
for the stage for many years before that date. When quite a 
youth he seems to have been seized with a passion for travel, 
and to have run away from his father's with as much money as 
he could scrape together, and crossed the Channel strange coun- 
tries for to see. He and his companion were robbed on their 
way through France, and after some adventures were persuaded 
to join the English Seminary in Rome. After a time he made 
his way back to England, and published an account of his experi- 
ences under the title 'The English Roman Life,' "discoursing the 
lives of such Englishmen as by secret escape leave their own coun- 
try to live in Rome under the servile yoke of the Pope's govern- 
ment." This was in 1582, and he would seem to have now made 
his living by translating from French and Italian, and composing 
rhymed plays. A rhymed play of his — " Fidele and Fortunatus," 
was entered on the Stationers' Books in 1584. The " Downfal of 
Robert Earl of Huntingdon," which was published in 1601, is 
supposed to have been originally and chiefly the work of Mun- 
day, modified by Chettle. Later in life, he seems to have aban- 
doned the stage for the counter : he devised and wrote the Lord 
Mayor's pageant in 1605, entiding it — "The Triumphs of Re- 
united Britannia," and is described on the title-page as " citizen 
and draper." He was several times employed after this to write 
these pageants, and was driven to complain of the difficulty of 
finding new subjects. The Golden Fleece being the drapers' coat 
of arms, he twice made use of the voyage of the Argo : and when 
the Mayor happened to be a fishmonger, he treated the citizens 
to " Chrysanaleia, or the Golden Fishing," to signify the close 
alliance between the Fishmongers and the Goldsmiths. 

There is nothing in Munday's compositions above the tamest 
mediocrity, and he is worth mentioning only as a specimen of the 
literary journey man of the time. 



VIII. — Henry Chettle (1563-160-?). 

Chettle, the editor of Greene's posthumous " Groatsworth of 
Wit," which contained the memorable attack on Shakespeare, 
was very much superior to Munday. He seems to have been 
originally a printer or stationer (he subscribes himself " sta- 
tioner " in a note of acknowledgment to Henslowe in 1598), 
and probably took to writing plays about the same time as 
Marlowe. Between 1597 and 1603, during which time he was 



254 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 

often in distress from want of money, his name is connected 
with the production of forty-seven plays, of sixteen of which 
he was sole author. Of his sixteen original plays, only one 
survives, *' Hoffman, or a Revenge for a Father," a tragedy, 
written probably about 1602, to compete with Shakespeare's 
" Hamlet," then in course of successful performance at the 
Globe Theatre. Of the thirty-one plays that he had a share 
in, all but three are lost — "Patient Grissell" (Chettle, Dekker, 
and Haughton), " Robin Hood" (Chettle and Munday), "Blind 
Beggar of Bethnal Green" (Chettle and Day). In 1607, Dekker 
speaks of Chettle as being in the Elysian fields, and gives the only 
record we have of his personal appearance — namely, that he was 
a fat man. 

" Hoffman " is a horrid inflated thing, absurd and bloody. The 
hero in revenging his father certainly does not suffer from the 
weakness of irresolution. Fortune throws an opportunity in his 
way, and he seizes it pitilessly, and makes it beget other oppor- 
tunities, till a long list of enemies, their relatives, and the stranger 
within their gates, perish by poison or steel. His mission of 
slaughter is very nearly fulfilled when he. has the weakness to fall 
in love with the Duchess of Luneberg, one of his intended victims, 
who pretends to listen to his addresses, and betrays him to his 
father's death by a red-hot crown of iron. It is remarkable that 
Chettle, like so many other of the Elizabethan poets, no matter 
how inflated he is in expressing vehement passions of rage, 
hatred, and revenge, displays considerable felicity in the expres- 
sion of the tender feelings. One might apply to the poets of 
that age two fines used by old Janicolo, in " Patient GrisseU" — 

" Indeed, my child, men's eyes do nowadays * 

Quickly take lire at the least spark of beauty." 

The beginning of the Third Act of " Hoffman " is very beautiful. 
It is a moonlight scene between the runaways Lodowick and 
Lucibella, imitated apparently from the "Merchant of Venice." 
They have walked till they are weary, the moon strewing silver 
on their path, and weeping a gentle dew on the flower-spotted 
earth. The flowers are beguiled by the light of Lucibella's eyes 
to open their petals " as when they entertain the lord of May." 
They rest on a bank of violets, and talk themselves asleep. 

" Lod. O Love's sweet touch ! with what a heavenly charm 
Do your soft fingers my war-thoughts disarm ! 
Prussia had reason to attempt my life, 
Enchanted by the magic of thy looks 
That cast a lustre on the blushing stars. 
Pardon, chaste Queen of Beauty ! make me proud, 
To rest my toiled head on your tender knee I 



HENRY CHETTLE. 2$$ 

My chin with sleep is to my bosom bowed; 

Fair, if you please, a little rest with me ! 

\_Ne reclines his head upon her lap. 
Luci. No, I'll be sentinel; I'll watch for fear 

Of venomous worms or wolves, or wolvish thieves. 

My hand shall fan your eyes, like the filmed wing 

Of drowsy Morpheus : and my voice shall sing 

In a low compass for a lullaby. 
Lod. I thank you! I am drowsy; sing, I pray, 

Or sleep; do what you please; I'm heavy, I ! 

Good night to all our care ! Oh ! I am blest 

By this soft pillow, where my head doth rest ! 

[LoDOWiCK sleeps. 
Luci. In sooth, I'm sleepy too ; I cannot sing : 

My heart is troubled with some heavy thing. 

Rest on these violets, whilst I prepare 

In thy soft slumber to receive a share ! 

Blush not, chaste moon, to see a virgin lie 

So near a prince ! 'tis no immodesty; 

For when the thoughts are pure, no time nor place 

Have power to work fair chastity's disgrace. 

Lod'wick, I clasp thee thus ! so, arm clip arm; 

Let sorrow fold them that wish true love's harm ! 

\_She sleeps, embracing LODOWICK." 

The finest lines in the play are the exclamation of Matthias when 
he believes that he has killed Lucibella unjustly, and finds that she 
still breathes — 

" There's life in Lucibella, for I feel 
A breath more odoriferous than balm 
Thrill through the coral portals of her lips." 

The beautiful song in " Patient Grissell," quoted in Palgrave's 
Treasury under the title of "The Happy Heart," is in all proba- 
bility the work of Dekker. But Chettle also had a certain gift 
of song. He appended to his " Mourning Garment, in memory 
of the death of Elizabeth," a "Shepherd's Spring Song," in cele- 
bration of the accession of James. Such raptures can hardly 
be other than feigned ; still, there are touches of beauty in the 
song. 

"Thenot and Chloris, red-lipped Driope, 

Shepherds, nymphs, swains, all that delight in field, 
Living by harmless thrift, your fat herds yield. 
Why slack ye now your loved company? 

Up sluggards, learn, the lark doth mounted sing 
His cheerful carols, to salute our king. 

The mavis, blackbird, and the little wren. 

The nightingale upon the hawthorn brier. 

And all the wing'd musicians in a quire 
Do with their notes rebuke dull lazy men. 

Up, shepherds, up, your sloth breeds all your shames; 

You sleep like beasts, while birds salute K. James. 



256 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 

The gray-eyed morning with a bhistering cheek, 
Like England's royal rose mixt red and white, 
Summons all eyes to pleasure and delight : 

Behold the evening's dews do upward reek, 

Drawn by the sun, which now doth gild the sky 
With its light-giving and world-cheering eye. 

Oh, that's well done ! I see your cause of stay 
Was to adorn your temples with fresh flowers; 
And gather beauty to bedeck your bowers 

That they may seem the cabinets of May. 

Honour this time, sweetest of all sweet springs, 
That so much good, so many pleasures brings." 



CHAPTER VII. 

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 

I. — His Life and Character. 

Steevens, Hallam, and Dyce are unreasonably sceptical and 
depressing in their summary of "all that is known with any' 
degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare." It is our own fault 
if we are disappointed and perplexed by what antiquaries have 
discovered, and if we refuse to interpret facts, because they do 
not illustrate Shakespeare's character in the precise way that we 
desire. A good deal more is known concerning Shakespeare than 
■: that " he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon — married and had 
, children there — went to London, where he commenced actor, and 
\ wrote poems and plays — returned to Stratford, made his will, died, 
and was buried." The industry of antiquaries has brought to 
light many significant facts concerning the poet's family ; concern- 
ing the public institutions and customs at Stratford during his 
boyhood ; and concerning the life of a player in London when 
Shakespeare belonged to the profession. To the same industry 
we are indebted for some suggestive particulars more directly 
personal : we know some facts about his marriage, his wife, and 
his children ; we have memorials of the effect that his poems and 
plays produced upon his contemporaries ; we know whether he 
returned to Stratford poor or rich, from necessity or from choice, 
a broken-down Bohemian or a prosperous and respected townsman ; 
and we know that after his death and burial, a bust was erected 
to his memory in the church of his native town, and that this 
bust still exists to show what sort of man he was in outward 
appearance. 

Shakespeare died on the 23d of April 16 t6, and the tradition 

is that he died on his birthday.^ The register of his baptism is 

« 

1 Mr Bolton Corney contests this on the ground that Shakespeare is said by 
the monument to have died in his 53d year. But if he had completed his 52d 
year, he might have been said to be in his 53d. 



258 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

consistent with this : he was baptised on the 2 6tli of April 1564. 
But the exact day of Shakespeare's birth is not worth discussing : 
much more important is it to know what were the surroundings of 
his childhood, what was his father's business, and the probable 
condition of his father's household. When the future " myriad- 
minded " dramatist came into the world, his father's household 
seems to have been radiant with the good-humour of prosperous 
industry and enterprise. The son of a substantial farmer at 
Snitterfield, three or four miles from Stratford, John Shakespeare 
had some thirteen years before opened a shop in Henley Street, 
Stratford. What he sold in this shop has been much disputed : 
he certainly sold gloves, and he probably sold also meat, wool, and 
"^barley. It is not uncommon now for farmers' sons in the neigh- 
bourhood of towns to set up as corn-merchants or butchers ; and 
there is nothing improbable in supposing that in those days, when 
there was less trade and less division of labour, John Shakespeare 
may have retailed farm produce to the townspeople of Stratford, 
selhng them barley, mutton, wool, and sheepskin gloves. But 
whatever he sold, the important fact is that he had prospered. 
Three years after he had settled in Stratford he had been able to 
buy two small copyhold properties. Soon after (probably in 1557) 
■^^he had married Mary Arden of Wilmecote, daughter of a substan- 
tial yeoman or proprietor-farmer in the neighbourhood, and heiress 
to a small farm called Ashbies. He had mixed with credit in the 
public affairs of the town : he had been appointed an ale-taster and 
elected a burgess; and before 1564 had filled in succession the 
offices of constable, affeeror (assessor of fines), and chamberlain. 
Such were the circumstances that Shakespeare was born into. 
Two little sisters, born before him, had died in infancy ; another 
brother, named Gilbert, was baptised on October 13, 1566; a 
sister, named Joan, on April 15, 1569; another sister, named 
Anna (who died in infancy), on September 28, 15 71. During this 
time John Shakespeare continued to prosper and rise in the esteem 
of the corporation. When little William was seven years old, his 
father attained the summit of municipal dignity, — being on Sep- 
tember 5, 15 71, elected chief alderman for the ensuing year. 

Our next question is — What were the provisions for school 
education in Stratford ? ^ A free school had been restored to the 
town in the reign of Edward VI., and to this in all probability 
L Shakespeare was sent at an early age, six or seven, and taught the 
p, rudiments of Latin. He learned at least enough to enter into the 
humour of Sir Hugh Evans's lesson to Master William Page ; to 
smell Costard's false Latin ; and to put jocularly into the mouth 

1 This subject has been thoroughly discussed by Professor Spencer Baynes in 
a series of papers in ' Eraser's Magazine,' J879-80. Mr Baynes supplies most 
ingenious and conclusive proof that Shakespeare read Ovid in the original. 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 259 

of Holofernes the first line of the eclogues of Mantuanus the Car- 
melite — lines then as familiar to schoolboys as the first lines of 
Virgil's eclogues are now. Such, so far as his plays afford any 
warrant, was the extent of Shakespeare's Latin knowledge. Ben 
Jonson's saying that he knew small Latin and less Greek, is 
obviously an epigrammatic way of saying that he knew no Greek '^'' 
at all. 

Take Shakespeare next at a point where his schoolboy days are 
over. How long did he continue at school? There is a tradition 
that he was withdrawn from school earlier than he might other- 
wise have been by the narrow circumstances of his father. So far 
this is substantiated by the ascertained fact that in 1578, when 
Shakespeare was fourteen years old, his father mortgaged the 
estate at Ashbies : from that date onwards there are unmistakable 
evidences of poverty gaining upon John Shakespeare's resources. 
Under such stress of circumstances nothing could be more natural 
than ta withdraw the eldest boy from school to assist in the mis- 
cellaneous business of butchering, wool-selHng, glove-making, and 
farming. There is nothing more unlikely, more incongruous, or 
more derogatory in Shakespeare's helping to kill a sheep, or make 
a glove, or herd cows in his boyhood, than in Burns's casting peats, 
pulling turnips, or gauging beer-barrels in his manhood. Such 
occupations gave strength to their minds as well as to their bodies : 
it brought home to them the earnestness of the struggle for exist- 
ence, and widened and deepened their sympathies with the mass 
of their fellowmen. 

To account for Shakespeare's knowledge of legal terms, Malone 
conjectured that after leaving school he was articled to an attor- 
ney Tii Stratford. But Shakespeare needed no experience of an 
attorney's office to awaken his interest in legal terms. He had 
motive enough without going beyond his father's household. 
There are no family secrets from the children of the poor. Shake- -. 
speare doubtless heard the painful deliberations of his once pros- 

.-■ perous parents, knew all their difficulties, and perused the mort- 
gage bond with a boy's grave curiosity and awe. Then, and more 
"" than once again, before he established himself and his parents in 
assured comfort, he received the sharpest of stimulants to make 

, out the exact meaning of legal terms. 

This, however, is the serious side of our poet's youth. It 
doubtless had a brighter side. Poverty could not repress such 
energy, ebullient spirits, and fresh open senses. We niay imagine ? 
the boy often running cheerfully between the shop in the town . 
and the farm in the country : sticking a cowslip in his breast, and ^ 
looking down at its cinque spots ; whistling after the birds ; roll- 
ing in the sun upon a bank of wild thyme ; reading and spouting ^ 
Sir Bevis of Southampton or Sir Guy of Warwick, and building, 



260 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

perhaps, many a boyish castle in the air. He was doubtless -, 
popular among his father's and his grandfather's ploughmen and 
shepherds : a leading spirit in the antics on Plough-Monday and at 
the Feast of Sheep-shearing. We may imagine him a favourite 
with some 'garrulous old repository of " merry tales of errant 
knights, queens, lovers, lords, ladies, giants, dwarfs, thieves, 
cheaters, witches, fairies, goblins, friars, &c.," which Burton says 
were among the ordinary recreations of winter : we may imagine / 
the boy listening gratefully to such tales while the old gossip is — - 

" Sitting in a corner turning crabs, 
Or coughing o'er a warmed pot of ale." 

If we imagine him thus employed in his boyhood, we can 
understand with what delight he reverted to such scenes amidst 
the excitement and nerve-shattering racket of an actor's life in 
London : we can enter with more vivid sympathy into his songs 
about spring freshness and simple winter comforts when they take 
us back with him from the hot exhaustion of the playhouse to the 
brightness of his youth in Stratford. 

But while we imagine Shakespeare engaging with high spirits in 
every sort of game and glee, one form of recreation in particular 
demands our attention as having probably exercised a powerful in- 
fluence on his future career. This was the representation of plays 
in Stratford. We know from the records of the corporation of 
Stratford that it was visited by various companies of players, the 
Queen's Company, the servants of Lord Worcester, of Lord Lei- 
cester, of Lord Warwick, and of other noblemen. There was a 
performance by such a company in the Guildhall when John 
Shakespeare was bailiff: and some of the actors were probably 
entertained in his house, and gazed at with wonder by his TTtt[e 
, ' son, then a child of five years. From his six^h year onwards, 
1 Shakespeare had thus frequent opportunities of witnessing plays. 
By the time he was two-and-twenty, he may^ have seen, as Mr 
Dyce says, " the best dramatic productions, such as they were, rep- 
resented by the best actors then alive." Further, our knowledge 
of the customs of the country enables us to conjectj^re with reason- 
able probability that Shakespeare was more than a spectator of 
play-acting. Apart from the well-known tendency of schoolboys 
in a country town to imitate the latest sensation in their play- 
ground, we know that throughout England in Shakespeare's youth 
dramatic pageants of various kinds, from " storial shows " to 
morris-dancing, were regular features in the amusements of the 
established festivals — Twelfth- Night, Shrove-Tuesday, Hock-Tues- 
day, May-day, Whitsuntide, &c. In Stratford, Whitsuntide seems 
to have been the favourite season for these exhibitions : as Hock- 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 261 

Tuesday was the usual time for the annual plays of the men of 
Coventry. In the " Wmter's Tale," Perdita is made to say — 

" Methinks I play as I have seen them do 
In IVhitszcn'' FastoralsT 

And in the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," Julia, disguised as a 

page, feigns that — 

" At Pentecost, 
When all oto' pageants of delight were played, 
Our youth got me to play the woman's part." 

The exhibition of the Nine Worthies in " Love's Labour Lost " and 
the " tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe " 
in " Midsummer Night's Dream," were in all likelihood caricatures 
of the sort of thing that young Shakespeare actually saw in Strat- (^ 
ford, and actually took part in. In these annual midsummer 
pageants of delight doubtless were included many varieties of per- 
formance — from the more ambitious efforts of the schoolmaster 
to the humble endeavours of hard-handed men that had never 
laboured in their minds before, and toiled their unbreathed 
memories for the first time. We may imagine Shakespeare, while 
still a schoolboy, with his small features and elegant shape, chosen 
to " play the woman's part," and instructed in such undertakings 
as — 

" Ariadne passioning 
For Theseus' perjury and unjust flight." 

We rnay imagine him at a somewhat later stage writing a play 
for a party of his boon companions, and organising of an evening 
in the woods about Stratford some such rude rehearsals as Peter 
Quince superintended " in the palace wood, a mile without the town, 
by moonlight." Holofernes, who plays three "worthies " himself, 
and Bottom, who covets every effective part, who can " speak in 
a monstrous little voice," who can roar either terribly or " as gently 
as any sucking dove," and whom the politic Quince propitiates by 
assigning him Pyramus — "a sweet-faced man ; a proper man, as 
one shall see in a summer's day ; a most lovely gentleman-like 
man " — were doubtless caricatures from nature. Another reminis- 
cence of these extravagantly amusing rehearsals — the most enjoy- 
able part of all amateur representations — may be traced in " Love's 
Labour Lost " in Boyet's account of the preparations for the Rus- 
sian masquerade (Act v. 2, 107). 

If, then, we take any part of Shakespeare's life between boy- 
hood and manhood, we findnature making great preparations for ? 
the future many-sided dramatist. We find the boy's life placed at 
times under deep shadows, and we fipd the shadows left at home 
and forgotten, returning, perhaps, with momentary pang to mingle 



262 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE I 

sadness with mirth. When he went out thinking gloomily of his 

father's accumulating distress and of the cheerless prospect for his 

/ little brothers and little sister, the darkness would often be chased 

■ from his susceptible spirit by spring freshness, sunshine, and bird- 

' singing, or by the company of light-hearted friends ; and he thus 

had early experience of all varieties of mood between despair and 

immoderate mirth. Had Shakespeare's life been all light and no 

shadow during that plastic period of youth when the man's chief 

tendencies are formed, he could never have searched so thoroughly 

the depths and the heights of the human heart. 

Further, when we know the dramatic tendency of Stratford, we 
lessen the miracle of his sudden rise as an actor and a dramatist, 
/^hat a raw youth from the country, unused to the stage and the 
I pen, should in the course of five or six years have risen to the 
I highest rank as a writer of plays, is simply incredible._3The boy 
is always father to the man : supreme achieveiiients demand a pro- 
longed conspiracy of circumstances. It need not lessen our rever- 
ence for the mighty genius of Shakespeare to find reason for 
believing that he was to the manner born ; that reckoning Time 
with her millioned accidents gave him a special education for 
the stage. Not only had he in his youth witnessed plays and 

? taken part in plays, but in all likelihood he had even as a boy 
^ read tales and romances with a special eye to plots and incidents 
suitable for dramatic representation. This much, in the failure of 
assured knowledge, we may reasonably conjecture as quite within 
the probabilities, or at least the possibilities, of the case. ' 

The first documentary memorial of Shakespeare, nexf to the 
record of his baptism, is his marriage bond. This is dated Novem- 

-^ ber 28, 1582 : he being then under nineteen years of age. His 
bride was Anne Hathaway, daughter of Richard Hathaway, a 
substantial yeoman, living at Shottery, a hamlet about a mile 
from Stratford. Anne was about eight years older than her boy- 
husband. From the signatures to the document Mr Halliwell- 
Phillipps argues that the parents of both parties approved of 
the match. One thing at least is clear, that there was in some 
quarter a certain eagerness for the ceremony : they were married 
'* with once asking of the banns of matrimony between them," and 
there is a clause in the bond throwing all the responsibility upon 
"the said William" himself, and "saving harmless" the Lord 
Bishop and his officers. The most probable reason for this ex- 
pedition appears in the date of the baptism of their first child, 

■^ Susanna, May 26, 1583. 

The next great event in his life is traditionary : he is said to 
have been prosecuted for stealing Sir Thomas Lucy's deer. Malone, 
De Quincey, and many others reject this incident, founding trium- 
phantly on the fact that Sir Thomas Lucy had no park. It is 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 263 

alleged, on the other hand, that though Sir Thomas had no park, 
" he may have had deer ; for his son and successor sent a buck as 
a present to Lord Ellesmere in 1602." There is nothing improb- 
able in the incident; and it is no whit more derogatory to the 
dignity of Shakespeare than the mere fact of his humble birth. 
To call the offence deer-s/ea/i/ig is to name it from the point of 
view of a game-preserver or a gamekeeper. We know that Lucy 
and the townsmen of Stratford were not on good terms : Mr 
HalHvvell-Phinipps has discovered a "riot" made "upon" him; 
and the excitable son of a popular burgess would doubtless con- 
sider it a good joke to carry off the unpopular gentleman's deer, ' 
more particularly if he had few of them. But it is unnecessary to t 
suppose that Shakespeare was actuated by anything beyond a 
natural liking " to hunt the wild deer, and to follow the roe." 

The tradition is that his trespass against Sir Thomas compelled 
Shakespeare to leave Stratford. Another reason may have co- 
operated in persuading him to seek fortune elsewhere — namely, 
his father's accumulating embarrassments. He may also have 
been somewhat frightened at the prospect of a large family : twin- 
children of his, Hamnet and Judith, were baptised on Feb. 2, _ 
1585. From whatever reason, he left Stratford and became a 
player in the Queen's company, performing at Blackfriars Theatre. 
The supposed date of this step is 1586. The probability is that 
he joined the Queen's or some other company as it passed through 
Stratford. The story given in Greene's ' Groatsworth of Wit ' 
of the beginning of his connection with the stage shows by what 
inducements the profession was recruited. The player that per- 
suaded Greene to join him had been a " country author, passing 
at a Moral," had seen the time when he carried his playing fardle 
or bundle on his back, and had risen to have a share in playing 
apparel alone worth more than two hundred pounds. Such an 
example of success might well have induced Shakespeare to leave 
his dull and cramped life at home : and he may have been em- 
ployed from the first, upon a reputation as a " country author," to 
remodel and adapt plays. 

The notion that Spenser referred to Shakespeare as " our pleas- 
ant Willy" in the 'Tears of the Muses' in 1591 is a most mis- 
taken and almost ludicrous attempt to snatch a compliment for 
the great dramatist. It would indeed have been more of a com- 
pliment to Spenser to make out that he discerned the coming 
man : but the possibility vanishes before the slightest attention to 
the real circumstances. The Tears of the Muses were supposed to 
be shed over the decay of learning. Thalia, the Muse of Comedy, 
was particularly sad over the absence of " learning's treasure " 
from the theatres, and the presumption of illiterate upstarts. 
Learned men, men of university education, no longer wrote 



264 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

comedy for the stage : it was abandoned to the base-born and 
illiterate. The lament was very characteristic of the aristocratic 
and refined Spenser, who had himself written comedies that were 
never represented. With what reason, then, is it supposed that 
Spenser included Shakespeare among the learned men whose 
aljsence Thalia deplored? Is there any evidence for supposing 
that Shakespeare at the age of twenty-seven could be spoken of as 
a writer of comedies who had of late ceased writing in disgust at 
the prevailing scurrility and ribaldry? Could he, while struggling 
as an actor and playwright to maintain himself and his family, be 
said to be holding haughtily aloof from the stage, because it had 
been taken possession of by base-born men with no university 
education ? Supposing that Shakespeare had written any comedies 
before that time, and supposing that Spenser, who lived for the 
most part in Ireland, had ever heard of his name, there would have 
been some ground for construing the lines _r~— ^ 

" Each idle wit at will presumes to make, 
And doth the learned's task upon him take," 

mto an ill-natured sneer at the extra-academical poet. I do not 
believe that these lines were pointed at Shakespeare, but I have 
no doubt that he smarted under their arrogance, and resented 
Spenser's academic pride in his sarcastic parody of the title of the 
work in " Midsummer Night's Dream " — 



^t)' 



"The thrice three Muses mourning for the death 
Of learning, late deceased in beggary." 

It is no doubt pleasing to suppose that when the gracious light 
of Shakespeare appeared in the orient, all other poets at once did 
homage to his sacred majesty. But the academic poets, even such 
of them as had condescended or been driven to write for the public 
stage, Marlowe, Greene, Nash, and Lodge, would have had to 
swallow very strong prejudices before they admitted Shakespeare 
to their fellowship, and recognised his claims to equal criticism. 
Marlowe opened his ''Tamburlaine " with a contemptuous go-by 
to the "jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits." Nash, in his 
epistle to Greene's " Menaphon," sneers at the efforts of " those 
that never were gowned in the university," laughs at the idea of 
men " busying themselves with the endeavours of art that could 
scarcely Latinise their neck- verse if they should have need : " they 
live by crimibs from the translator's trencher, and obtain from 
English Seneca "whole Ua?nlets — I should say, handfuls of tragi- 
cal speeches." ^ These were general denunciations of extra-aca- 
demical presumption. But Greene, in his dying ' Groatsworth of 

1 This was in 1587. There are certain slight traces of Seneca in Shakespeare's 
" Hamlet," but this was probably an earlier version of the play on which Shake- 
speare founded. 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 265 

Wit,' made a direct attack on Shakespeare. He recommended his 
friends to give up play-writing as no longer a fit occupation for 
gentlemen ; censured the ingratitude and presumption of players, 
and assailed in particular one " upstart crow beautified with our 
feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapt in a player's hide, sup- 
poses he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best 
of you ; and being an absolute Johannes Fac-totum, is, in his own 
conceit, the only Shakescene in a country." It is unnecessary to 
suppose that this bitter outburst, the best of all testimonies to 
Shakespeare's power, was caused by his having been employed 
to remodel any of Greene's plays. The phrase " beautified with 
our feathers " may be, as we are entitled to infer from the tone 
of Nash's epistle, nothing more than an expression of academical 
arrogance, looking down with supreme contempt upon the un- 
gowned playwright as one that could not possibly have anything 
except what he stole from more learned authors.^ 

In Lodge's prose satire, ' Wit's Misery or the World's Madness,' 
of date 1596, there is a passage that may or may not be another 
insult to our dramatist from the same set of university pens. He 
is describing a personification of Envy, and goes on to say among 
other things that " he walks in black under colour of gravity, and 
looks as pale as the visard of the ghost which cried so miserably 
at the theatre like an oysterwise,^ Hamlet, revenge'' ^ Now, if 
there is anything in the tradition that Shakespeare played the 
part of the ghost in " Hamlet," we have here a slight touch of 
ridicule at Shakespeare's acting, and a partisan support by Lodge 
of his old friend Greene. That, however, depends entirely upon 
the worth of the tradition, which certainly has a good many 
plausible considerations in its favour. Be that as it may, there 
is another passage in this same work of Lodge's a few pages 
farther on which has an undoubted interest. Lodge enumerates 
the "divine wits" of the time, and the following is his list: 
" Lyly, the famous for facility in discourse ; Spenser, best read 
in ancient poetry ; Daniel, choice in word and invention ; Drayton, 
diligent and formal ; Th. Nash, true English Aretine." Shakespeare 
is not mentioned. 

Lodge's mention of Drayton confirms my opinion (p. 205) that 
he and not Shakespeare is the Action of Spenser's " Colin Clout." 

1 There is a remarkable passage in " Hamlet" (ii. 2, 353-370), where the habit 
of attacking " the common stages " is sharply ridiculed. The poet is advised not to 
be so severe on the common player, because he may be obliged to take to the trade 
himself. 

2 Oysterwise, whether misprint or not, is the reading, not oysterwife, as always 
quoted. Oysters do gape very much, as actors often do in mouthing this cry. 

3 This passage at least establishes one of two things : either that Shakespeare's 
" Hamlet" was upon the stage in 1596, or that the preceding play on the same sub- 
ject also contained the ghost. Shakespeare was as likely to have played the ghost 
in the one version as in the other. 



266 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

True, " diligent and formal " are epithets very different from 
Spenser's high eulogium ; but the expression " choice in word 
and invention," applied to Daniel, is not more unlike Spenser's 
praises of that poet. The fact is that Lodge's epithets apply, and 
apply with much discrimination, chiefly to the sonnets of the two 
poets. And apart from this mention of Drayton by Lodge, I doubt 
very much whether " Venus and Adonis " would have suittd the 
taste of Spenser. The man who considered it necessary to apolo- 
gise for the sensuous freedom of his own descriptions of earthly 
beauty, may well be supposed to have looked coldly on the ram- 
-pant paganism of the first heir of Shakespeare's invention. No ; 
^ I believe that Shakespeare struggled into fame in the teeth of 
strong prejudices, and that the established potentate of the literary 
world, the refined and haughty Spenser, did nothing to help his 
ascent. Shakespeare was an enthusiastic admirer of Spenser, but 
the elder poet was much less catholic, infinitely more narrow and 
exclusive. In the very passage where he praised Action, Spenser 
declared that no living poet was to be compared to Sir Philip 
Sidney — always, of course, excepting himself. The first recogni- 
tions of Shakespeare came from humbler pens. Henry Chettle, 
the stationer and playwright, who edited Greene's ' Groatsworth 
of Wit,' apologised a few months afterwards for the attack on 
Shakespeare, and mentioned his civil demeanour, his excellence as 
a player, his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, the two 
last particulars being " reported by divers of worship." This is 
the first complimentary notice of Shakespeare, and it comes from 
one who was himself an ungowned playwright. The compliments 
paid by Barnfield, Meres, Weever, and others to Shakespeare's 
honey-flowing vein, and suchlike, were not only the homage of 
very inferior men, but followed upon a wide public recognition 
of the poet's power. The general public were really the first to 
recognise Shakespeare : no literary potentate bailed him out of 
obscurity. His " Venus and Adonis," published in 1593, ran rapidly 
through several editions, reaching a fifth in 1602. His " Lucrece," 
published in the following year, though not so popular as its fore- 
runner, still was widely sold. His plays became the talk of the 
town. In the i ith satire of his " Scourge of Villainy," 1598, Mar- 
ston asks what is doing in the theatres, and finds that the rage is 
all for " Romeo and Juliet." 

" Luscus, what's played to-day? Faith now I know; 
I set thy Hps abroach, from whence doth flow 
Nought but poor Juliet and Romeo." 

The Queen heard of Shakespeare's fame, had his plays represented 
at Court, and was " taken " with them : seeing Falstaff in " Henry 
I v.," she is said to have desired to see the fat knight in love, and 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 267 

thus to have suggested the " Merry Wives of Windsor." There 
was a demand for his plays in print. In 1597 he pubhshed 
three tragedies, "Richard 11. ," ''Richard III.," and "Romeo 
and Juhet." In 1598 he pubhshed "Love's Labour Lost" 
and "Henry IV.," besides second editions of "Richard II." and 
"Richard III.": in 1599, second editions of "Romeo" and 
"Henry IV.": in 1600, two editions of a "Midsummer Night's 
Dream," two editions of the " Merchant of Venice," " 2 Henry 
IV.," " Henry V.," " Much Ado about Nothing," and a second 
edition of "Titus Andronicus." After 1600 he seems to have felt 
his fame to be assured, and to have found it more profitable to 
let his plays be seen only in stage representation. He probably 
made an agreement with the management of Blackfriars Theatre 
to refrain from publication that he might not damage the attend- 
ance at the playhouse. Even before 1600 he did not publish 
every play that he wrote : Meres enumerates six comedies and six 
tragedies of his put upon the stage before 1598 : namely, "Two 
Gentlemen of Verona," " Comedy of Errors," " Love's Labour 
Lost," " Love's Labour Won " (supposed to be the play now 
known by the title "All's Well that Ends Well"), "Midsummer 
Night's Dream," "Merchant of Venice," "Richard IL," "Richard 
III.," " Henry IV.," " John," " Titus Andronicus," and " Romeo 
and Juliet." Four of these were not published till after his ~ 
death. 

Shakespeare was thus in high repute before the close of the 
century. His popularity did not decrease after the accession of 
James. Such was the demand for his works that in 1603 a 
piratical bookseller issued an unauthorised and imperfect edition ot 
" Hamlet," based, probably, upon notes of the play taken during 
the representation : this provoked him to break through his rule, and 
he published a correct edition in the following year. In 1 608, for 
some reason unknown, he made another exception to his rule, and 
published the tragedy of " King Lear " : it was so popular that 
three editions were printed in the same year. In that year, also, 
a third and a fourth edition of "Richard II." were called for; 
besides a third edition of " Henry V." and a fourth edition of 
" Henry IV." He frequently received the honour of having his 
plays represented at Court : he was the king's favourite dramatist, 1 
and there is a tradition that he received a complimentary letter * 
from the king's own hand. There are evidences, also, that he was 
prospering in worldly affairs as well as in the good opinion of those 
around him. Early in 1597 he bought for jP^do (equivalent to 
ten times as much of our money) one of the best houses in Strat- 
ford, called New Place. Fortunately, also, there have been pre- 
served letters written in that and the following year by natives of 
Stratford : in which correspondence the poet is spoken of as a man 



268 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

likely to invest money in Stratford, is asked for the loan of jQ^t^, 
and is recommended as a person likely to procure a loan for a 
friend and comitryman. In 1602 he made a more extensive 
investment near his native town — buying for £2>'^o a hundred 
and seven acres of arable land in the parish of Old Stratford. In 
the same year he purchased some property in the town of Strat- 
ford. In 1605 he made his largest purchase : paying ^£^440 for 
the remainder of a lease — granted in 1544 for ninety-two years — 
of the tithes great and small of Stratford, Old Stratford, Bishop- 
ton, and Welcombe. 

At what time he retired from the stage is not known with 
^_^certainty, any more than the date of his entrance upon it. A 
tradition is recorded in Ward's Diary, extending from 1648 to 
1679, that Shakespeare "frequented the plays all his younger 
time, but in his elder days lived at Stratford, and supplied the 
stage with two plays every year, and for it had an allowance so 
large that he spent at the rate of ^1000 a-year, as I have heard." 
Ward was vicar of Stratford-on-x\von, and as he niay have had his 
information from persons that had been acquainted with Shake- 
speare, there is no reason to discredit the main fact. We iiiay 
lawfully supp_ose that Shakespeare spent his latter years at Strat- 
ford in comfortable ease, looking after his. farm and his tithes, and 
enjoying the conversation of his friends. His father had died in 
1 60 1, and his mother died in 1608 ; but his wife was still alive, 
and his daughter was well married to a doctor in Stratford, and 
presented him with a little grand-daughter to be the old man's 
darling. Some traditions are preserved of his witty repartees in 
genial Stratford society ; but none of them bear any internal evi 
dence of genuineness. 

Shakespeare died at New Place, on the 23d of April 1616. The 
only record of the cause of his death is the following entry in the 
Diary just mentioned : " Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson 
had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shake- 
speare died of a fever there contracted." On this Mr Dyce 
remarks : " That such a symposium was held is likely enough. 
Drayton, a native of Warwickshire, and frequently in the neigh- 
bourhood of Stratford, may fairly be presumed to have partaken 
at times of Shakespeare's hospitality ; and Jonson, who, al30ut two 
years after, wandered on foot into Scotland and back again, would 
think little of a journey to Stratford for the sake of visiting so 
dear a friend ; nevertheless, we should hardly be justified in deter- 
mining the cause of Shakespeare's death on the authority of a 
T tradition which was not written down till nearly half a century 
after the event." 

Three elaborate works have been written on the portraits of 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 269 

Shakespeare: Boaden's, 1824: Wivell's, 1827; and Friswell's, 
1864. Friswell's, entitled 'Life Portraits of Shakespeare,' is rec- 
ommended by its containing photographs of the principal por- 
traits — the Stratford bust, the Droeshout engraving, the Chandos 
painting (the original of the most common Shakespeare face), the 
Jansen painting, and the Felton head. Only the first two of these 
portraits are known for certain to be portraits of Shakespeare. 
The bust, probably put up very soon after the poet's death, was 
seen and praised as a faithful likeness in 1623. The Droeshout 
engraving appeared on the title-page of the first edition of Shake- 
speare's plays in the same year, and received a high compliment 
in Ben Jonson's famous commendatafy verses : it is a bad engrav- 
ing, but may have been a fair likeness. The bust, however, which 
is believed to have been copied from a cast taken after death — a 
practice then sufficiently common — may be accepted upon all 
considerations as the most trustworthy memorial of the poet's face ; 
the top and back part of the head seem to be rounded off in a 
regular oval without any pretension to phrenological fidelity. The 
forehead is not so high as in the ideal Shakespeare's head, but is 
broad, full, and smoothly arched ; it is well balanced by the sub- 
stantial English yeoman jaw and double chin. In proportion to 
the full forehead and full underface, the intermediate features are 
small and delicate, and they are set with the same easy symmetry. 
From the shortness of the nose and the length of the upper lip, it 
has been conjectured that the sculptor had an accident with the 
nose ; but we should remember that Scott's upper hp was also 
irregularly long, and that Shakespeare's admirers were not likely 
to accept a maimed sculpture. Originally the bust was coloured : 
the hands and face of a flesh colour, the eyes of a light hazel, the 
hair and beard auburn. Towards the end of last century, it was 
coated over with white paint by one of those respectable medioc- 
rities whose sense of propriety is sometimes more destructive than 
the most outrageous Vandahsm. It has since been restored to its 
original colours. 

It is a favourite way with some eulogists of Shakespeare to deny 
him all individuality whatsoever. He was not one man, they say, 
but an epitome of all men. His mind, says Hazlitt, " had no one 
peculiar bias or exclusive excellence more than another. He was 
just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He 
was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was 
nothing in himself; but he was all that others were or that they 
could become." Against such a degradation of Shakespeare's 
character, or of any man's character, it is our duty to protest. In 
trying to make Shakespeare more than human, the reckless pane- 
gyrist makes him considerably less than human : instead of the 



270 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ! 

man whose prudence made him rich, whose affectionate nature 
made him loved ahiiost to idolatry, and whose genius has been 
the wonder of the world, we are presented with plasticity in the 
abstract, an object not more interesting than a quarry of potter's 
clay. 

One of the most curious traits in Shakespeare's character is his 
worldly wisdom. I do not allude to what is called the wisdom of 
Shakespeare, as displayed in his maxims of morality and politics. 
I mean the commonplace virtue, rarely exhibited by men of genius, 
of prudently expending the material rewards of their toil. We 
are indebted to the antiquaries for the illustration of this. Not 
only have they shown us how he invested large savings in his 
native town, but by ransacking corporation records and other pub- 
lic archives they have discovered for us how firmly he looked after 
his property. We find him in 1604 prosecuting one Rogers who 
had bought malt from him and failed to pay. We find him in 
1608 bringing an action against John Addenbroke for recovery of 
a small debt, and thereafter, on the flight of the debtor, proceed- 
ing against the security. In 16 12 w^e find him conjoined in a 
petition to the Court of Chancery to compel certain sharers in the 
farming of the tithes to pay their just proportions of a common 
burden. In 16 14 he took measures to resist the proposed enclos- 
ure of certain common lands which would have affected the value 
of his property. These little items are not without an interest : 
they are small in themselves, but they suggest a good deal. The 
hardships of Shakespeare's early days, the misfortunes of his 
father, had taught him prudence : he was evidendy a firm man of 
business, not to be imposed upon or cheated with impunity. 

This combination of sure and firm-set prudence with heaven- 
climbing genius is the fundamental wonder in Shakespeare, the 
permanent marvel of his constitution. From whatever point we 
look at him, this wonder emerges. With all his capricious stream- 
ers of fancy, he does not gyrate off into aimless oddity and ec- 
centricity. The torrent, tempest, and whirlwind of impassioned 
imagination is, in him, controlled by a temperance that pulls it 
back from the raving frenzy of incontinent riot. He is copiously 
inventive and original, but he does not vex, strain, and dislocate 
his faculty by striving after plots, characters, maxims, words, and 
images that had never before been seen in print, or heard upon 
tlie stage. Large, steadfast, clear-eyed sagacity and sanity are 
everywhere conspicuous in Shakespeare. 

Readers of Shakespeare not familiar with the antecedent litera- 
ture are naturally enough betrayed into thinking that he drew all 
his wise sentences about character, morality, and politics from his 
own experience and observation. Now this is the very thing that 
his sagacity kept him from attempting. He knew how poor a 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 27 1 

show one man's experience can make, and he opened his mind 
freely to the accumulated experience of ages. There were abun- 
dant stores within his reach. The moral-plays were store-houses of 
proverbial philosophy : the common wisdom of many generations 
was harvested and preserved there as in granaries. The works of 
all our poets from Chaucer downwards were full of similar gen- 
eralisations : they were studiously affected in the tales and plays 
of his immediate predecessors. To have neglected these accumu- 
lations, if it had been possible, would have been the reverse of 
wise : Shakespeare used them liberally. It is not to be supposed 
that he deliberately and in cold blood searched in these reposi- 
tories for matter to fill up a dialogue ; but his mind was full of 
them, and he took what came to him in the act of composition 
and what best suited his purposes, without troubling himself as 
to whether it was original or commonplace. And in like manner 
with his imagery. Before he began to write, nature had been 
ransacked and even a fabulous natural history invented in the 
craze for imagery. This, doubtless, gave an immense stimulus to 
the poet's original faculty, as the passion for moral and poHtical 
saws gave to his powers of observation. But had Shakespeare 
resolved to use no weighty sentence and no figure of speech that 
had ever been used before, he would have been forfeiting all hope 
of success as a dramatist ; deliberately taking up with the glean- 
ings, the husks, and the crumbs. A play furnished only with 
recondite maxims and far-fetched imagery would have been in- 
tolerably thin and meagre. One thing, however, was and is to be 
expected from dramatists having recourse to the great accumulated 
wealth of literature : we expect them to give a new application, 
and, above all, a new expression, to what they borrow. We give 
them liberty to take the seeds, but not to take the plant. This 
was what Shakespeare did. Now and then, perhaps, he car- 
ried off a whole plant, when he was in a hurry ; but in nearly 
every case he took only the seed, the suggestion, and from it 
reared a plant far excelHng the original stock. So incomparable 
was his genius for expression, that very rarely did he fail to im- 
prove what he appropriated. And therein lay his power and ex- 
cellence : not in that he added more than any other man to the im- 
mense stock of old-world wisdom, but in that he gave to what he 
adopted an expression so superlative that generalised observations 
centuries older than him have passed into common speech in his 
forms. His wisdom was the wisdom of sagacious choice and happy 
appHcation : but his genius was his own. 

If we wish to have a vivid impression of the superiority of 
Shakespeare's judgment, we cannot do better than compare his 
plays with tales on which they have been founded. He did not 
exhaust himself in trying to discover new situations ; but going in 



272 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

with victorious opulence of matter, took the best situations that 
occurred to him, from his own mind or from novels, poems, his- 
tories, or even from plays then upon the stage, and filled them out 
in a way that transcended all competition. When our dramatic 
antiquaries meet in Shakespeare with a story that they have not 
hitherto discovered in any previous writer, they pursue their in- 
quiries with full confidence that they will some day stumble upon 
the original. And these discoveries, so far from hurting Shake- 
speare's reputation, are the most astonishing disclosures of his 
power. Not only does he enrich the story, and give an incompar- 
able embodiment and expression to the characters, but he recasts 
the plot and the relations of the dramatis personce with large and 
clear judgment, so as to produce a more harmonious whole. 

" Myriad-minded " has become a favourite epithet for Shake- 
speare : " myriad-mooded," if it did not sound so odd, might be 
more precisely descriptive of the dramatist's most essential endow- 
ment. One man becomes able to understand the mental habits 
of many other men if he passes through many changes of mood : 
if the world presents itself to him in many different lights accord- 
ing to his varying states of mind. A stolid, immobile man — or a 
man, however mobile, whose life was easy, unvaried, unexcited — 
could not be a dramatist of any considerable range : no power of 
imaginative genius can go far in constructing states of mind that 
have never fallen within the lines of its experience. But, indeed, 
active imaginative genius, combined with keen interest in human 
beings, must inevitably produce incessant variableness of mood : 
a man with these qualities in him must be constantly and incon- 
tinently changing his imaginary relations with the world : his 
imagination will not allow him to be tranquil : moodiness, variable- 
ness, is the imperious law of his being. Shakespeare, in imagining 
the general mental attitude of crafty Bolingbroke, cynical Timon, 
melancholy Jacques, mad-headed Hotspur, or even dare-devil 
Richard, and unconscionable Falstaff, fell back upon more or less 
temporary attitudes of his own variable mind. There could not 
be a more monstrous mistake than to suppose the great dramatist 
to have been a calm man, who was never melancholy, and who sat 
comfortably in a study turning the world round for his amusement, 
and meditating quietly on the strange fellows that nature had 
formed in her time. He could not have understood so many of 
those strange fellows unless he had for however brief an interval 
passed through the experience of their moods. We know that 
Shakespeare lived a life of changeful circumstances. In his boy-- 
hood, his father's position underwent a gradual change in the eyes 
of the townspeople of Stratford ; and in his youth he took an 
unusual step that also exposed him to various comments. In 
London he experienced the feelings of gradually making his way in 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 2/3 

the world through various obstructions, and at all times he occu- 
pied a doubtful position, exposing him to great variety of treat- 
ment between the extremes of insult and admiration. He was 
brought into direct contact with men of all classes, and received 
with all the diversity of manner experienced by men whose posi- 
tion is not fixed by rigid convention. Now a man of active 
imagination and quick susceptibilities could not but have 
approached these changing circumstances in different moods ; 
now melancholy, now defiant, sometimes eager, sometimes cool 
and indifferent, disposed sometimes to laugh at everything, and 
sometimes to cry at nothing. In the course of his varied life, he 
had, doubtless, a touch of the dissolute and reckless spirit of his 
favourite " Hal " — " of all humours that have showed themselves 
humours since the old days of goodman Adam ; " as well as of the 
grave, pohtic, and resolute spirit of Hal's father, Bolingbroke, or 
Hal himself when he became the heroic Harry the Fifth. 

The amazing thing is to find all this variableness, without 
which dramatic insight is impossible, in combination with the 
fundamental steadiness, without which dramatic execution is 
impossible. All this variableness had, as it were, a centre — was 
an incessant movement above, below, and around a fixed centre 
of gravity. For all his presumable moodiness, Shakespeare would 
seem to have never composed but in one mood — the mood of 
dramatic impartiality. Nobody has been able to detect in his 
character any strong bias of opinions held dogmatically by him- 
self. He would seem to have composed with intense concentra- 
tion, setting himself with all the strength of his imagination to 
express the particular concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, 
actions, and motives that emerged from his story of love or 
revenge, and allowing himself to be swayed by no considerations 
except dramatic effect. Preachers sometimes essay to prove his 
religion and morality by choice excerpts, but they only prove 
that he put such sentiments into the mouths of his characters : he 
holds the mirror up to the irreligion and immorality of Edmund 
and lago, and displays them with equal clearness and force. One 
of his characters explains away prophecy, another rationalises pre- 
sentiments, a third declares that miracles are ceased, and that we 
can admit only natural means : yet ghosts walk in his dramas, 
men are haunted by evil forebodings, and calamities are heralded 
by monstrous portents. It is vain to look for consistent opinions 
where the dramatist's principle is to embody men of all shades 
with strict impartiality in their exact form and pressure. 

The most amiable and one of the best attested features of 
Shakespeare's character, is the constancy of certain attachments. 
We may well suppose that, with an imagination ever ready to 
invest objects with attributes not their own, and sufficiently subtle 



2/4 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

to find for Titania points of attraction in the head of an ass, 
Shakespeare had many passing loves and friendships. But he 
was capable also of constant attachment. The strongest evidence 
of this is found in his continued visits to his native place, and his 
final settlement there in the evening of his life. True, had we 
no other evidence of his intense affections, the fact of his retire- 
ment to Stratford might be otherwise interpreted : it might be 
said that he left London and its pleasant society because there his 
profession as an actor exposed him to indignities that his pride 
would not brook, and went to Stratford because there he was 
treated as a person of consequence. In support of this might be 
alleged the significant fact that in 1596 his father, probably at his 
instigation, applied for a grant of arms at the Heralds' College. 
We know from Shakespeare's sonnets that he felt keenly the 
inferiority and disgrace attaching to his profession ; and it is not 
unlikely that he went back to the scenes of his boyhood with a 
certain feehng of relief from the scene of his humihation. It is 
not perhaps to be denied that Shakespeare was glad to leave 
London, with all the attractions of wit-combats with Ben Jonson 
at the Mermaid, because he had not Big Ben's rough indifference 
to public opinion, and could not bear to be patronised for his 
genius by men that felt themselves above his profession. But 
while we acknowledge all this, we have still to account for the 
fact that his native town of Stratford was the chosen place of his 
retirement : he might have invested his gains in some quarter 
where he was utterly unknown, but for the desire to be near the 
friends and the scenes of his youth. And we are entitled to put 
upon the fact its most natural construction, when we find that 
supported by the warmth of attachment expressed in his sonnets, 
and the recorded testimonies of the gentleness of his nature. " I 
loved the man," said Ben Jonson, " and do honour his memory, 
on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, 
and of an open and free nature." 

II. — His Words and Imagery. 

The art of putting things cleverly and playing upon words was 
never carried to a greater height than in the age of Elizabeth. 
The Elizabethans were conscious word-artists — " engineers of 
phrases," as Thomas Nash said. "To see this age!" cries the 
clown in "Twelfth Night," "a sentence is but a cheveril glove 
to a good wit ; how quickly the wrong side may be turned out- 
ward ! " And this same clown was acting in delicious caricature 
of the age, when he fastidiously rejected the word " element " — 
" Who you are and what you would are out of my welkin, I might 
say ' element,' but the word is overdone." 



HIS WORDS AND IMAGERY. 275 

The delight in simiUtudes went naturally with this extravagant 
craze for uncommon expression : the fancy was solicited, and when 
sohcitation failed, was tortured to satisfy the reigning fashion. 
They ransacked for comparisons the heavens above, the earth 
beneath, the waters under the earth, and the historical and 
mythical generations of earth's inhabitants. The wit of those 
days viewed the whole world as so much figurative material ; 
he knew it as a painter knows his box of colours, or an enthusi- 
astic botanist the flora of his own parish. 

That was the sort of fermentation likely to produce great 
masters of words. To call a spade a spade is a most benumb- 
ing and stifling maxim to literary genius : an Elizabethan would 
not have called a spade a spade if he could possibly have found 
anything else to call it. The Elizabethan literature would not 
have been the rich field that it is had a wretched host of Dean 
Alfords been in the ascendant, with their miserable notions about 
idiomatic purity and Queen's English. 

The number of words used by Shakespeare is said to be 15,000 ; 
and the prodigious magnitude of this number is usually brought out 
by comparing it with Milton's number, which is 8000.^ We might 
say to him as Katherine said to Wolsey : — 

*' Your words, 
Domestics to you, serve your will as't please 
Yourself pronounce their office ; " 

and add that his verbal establishment was upon an unparalleled 
scale. To some extent, indeed, it would seem that those hosts of 
servants were too officious ; obtruding their services in such jost- 
ling numbers as to embarrass operations. It would appear as if, 

1 Shakespeare's use of technical terms and phrases deserves special notice, as 
having created quite a department of literature. Several volumes have been 
written, dwelling upon all phraseology that belongs, whether exclusively or not, 
to special trades, occupations, or professions ; each contending for some one 
occupation that Shakespeare must have engaged in before he could have been 
able to use its technicalities with such abundance and discrimination. The phrase- 
ology of law, medicine, surgery, chemistry, war, navigation, music, field-sports, 
blacic-art — the phraseology of each of these was used by Shakespeare, it is argued, 
with the intelligence of an experienced proficient. We have also special treatises 
on his acquaintance willi botany, entomology, and ornithology. When each of 
several volumes contends for a different occupation as the occupation of Shake- 
speare's youth or early manhood, and each argues on the same fundamental prin- 
- ciple with equal conclusiveness, they refute each other and discredit their common 
principle. The principle underlying all these arguments is, that a man cannot use 
the phraseology of an occupation without having practised that occupation. It 
is reduced to an absurdity by the latest work in the department, Mr Blades's 
' Shakspere and Typography,' in which it is cleverly argued from Shakespeare's 
use of printing technicalities that he must have been a printer. The fact is that 
Shakespeare's contemporaries as well as himself ransacked all trades and profes- 
sions for striking phrases. Legal terms were in particular request, and it was not 
necessary for Shakespeare to study, much less to practise law, in order to acquire 
them : they abounded in the general literature of the period. 



2*]^ WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

when Shakespeare sat in the heat of composition, every word in 
the sentence just penned overwhehned him with its associations ; 
so perfectly were his intellectual forces mobilised, and so fresh 
and eager were they for employment. And besides these officious 
troops of words, he had in his service troops of images no less 
officious, no less ready to appear upon the slightest hint. Upon 
the slightest hint that they were wanted, they came flashing in with 
lightning excitement from all quarters ; from pages of poems, 
histories, and even compendiums, from echoes of the stage, from 
all regions of earth and sky that he had seen or realised in 
thought. 

M. Taine lays most stress upon the copiousness of Shakespeare's 
imagery. " It is a series of paintings which is unfolded in his 
mind. He does not seek them, they come of themselves ; they 
crowd within him, covering his arguments ; they dim with their 
brightness the pure light of logic. He does not labour to explain 
or prove ; picture on picture, image on image, he is for ever copy- 
ing the strange and splendid visions which are engendered one 
within another, and are heaped up within him." 

Now I am not prepared to admit that Shakespeare's argumenta- 
tive faculty was thus overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of imagery. 
If the dramatist's mind had been thus overpoweringly pictorial, he 
would have been too much carried away by the imagination of the 
splendid portents, the blazing meteors, and feverish earthquakes, 
that prefigured Glendower's birth, to be capable of meeting it with 
Hotspur's rejoinder, conceived on the soundest principles of induc- 
tive philosophy ; the fascination of the fiery heaven and shaking 
earth would have prevented him from seeing that the same things 
might have happened if Glendower's mother's cat had but kittened 
though himself had never been born. That is a typical instance 
of logical faculty rising superior to the engrossing force of imagi- 
nation. Apart, however, from that, I am of opinion that M. 
Taine exaggerates the pictorial side of Shakespeare's genius. It 
doubtless affords a very plausible explanation of Shakespeare's 
mixed metaphors to say that they were produced by the press and 
crush of thronging images ; as his liberties with grammatical usage 
arose from over-abundance and strong pressure of words. But 
there is reason to believe that Shakespeare, like every other great 
verbal artist, took more delight in words than in forms and colours, 
as a painter takes more delight in forms and colours than in words : 
and that he was tempted both to mixed metaphors and to viola- 
tions of grammatical usage by a desire for fresh and startling 
combinations of words. This thirst of his ear for new conjunc- 
tions overpowered every other consideration. When he was 
importuned by several images at once, he knocked two or three 
of them forcibly together ; but I believe that the temptation to 



HIS WORDS AND IMAGERY. 2/7 

do SO came chiefly from his deHght in the new marriage of words 
thus consummated. 

Indeed, we spread a radical misconception of the poet's art, of 
the means whereby he gains his hold upon our sensibilities, when 
we lay M. Taine's stress upon the genesis of his imagery. It is 
not the pictures of form and colour that are the principal in- 
gredients in the poet's charm : they complete the spell, but are 
not the essence of it. What takes us captive is the gathering up 
of ideas in new groups under new bands of words ; our senses are 
ravished by new combinations of words in a poem as by fresh 
harmonies in an oratorio. In a new combination of words, of 
course, we are affected by much beyond the mere sound, though 
that, doubtless, is a large element to many minds. The words 
appeal to us by multitudinous associations, awake slumbering 
echoes in many different chambers of our being : the charm of 
the new eiicounter is that it rouses and locks together many mem- 
ories never before united. Several people in the Elizabethan age, 
or indeed in any other age, could have led us through " a wood, 
crowded with interwoven trees and luxuriant bushes, which con- 
ceal you and close your path, which delight and dazzle your eyes 
by the magnificence of their verdure and the wealth of their 
bloom." Spenser comes very much nearer this description than 
Shakespeare, to my mind : to me it conveys not the remotest 
approach to the peculiar effect of Shakespeare. Simple and easy 
as the operation seems, the power of fresh and effective word-com- 
bination is one of the rarest of gifts : it is indispensable to a great 
poet ; and part of Shakespeare's main distinction among great 
poets is the possession of this power in an incomparable degree. 
Something in the effect of his combinations upon us is due, no 
doubt, to change in the usage of words : many words whose con- 
junction raised no surprise in an Elizabethan, have since wandered 
away from each other and gathered other associations about them, 
so that their reunion in our minds is like the reunion of youthful 
friends in old age. The words lay near each other then, and had 
little variety of idea to bring into collision : now, in this later 
stage of their existence, they have lived long apart, they surprise 
us by their mutual recognition, and they bring many memories 
into shifting indefinite comparison, indefinably charming coUision. 

In reading Shakespeare's predecessors, we often meet with what 
appear to have been the suggestions or seeds of passages in his 
plays ; and the comparison of the suggestion with its development 
gives a most vivid notion of the amplitude and rapidity of growth 
in Shakespeare's mind. So abundant and mobile were words and 
images in that soil, so warm its generating force, that a seed fallen 
there at once germinated and shot up with the utmost facihty 



2/8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

of assimilation into a complete organism. Take a simple case. 
When Gaveston, in Marlowe's " Edward II.," returns from ban- 
ishment, and is recognised as the king's favourite, he is besieged 
by a host of hunters for patronage. Among the rest is a traveller, 
at whom Gaveston looks for a moment, and then says — " Let me 
see : thou wouldst do well to wait at my trencher and tell me lies 
at dinner-time ; and as I like your discoursing, I'll have you." 
Shakespeare seems to have been tickled with this deliberate utilisa- 
tion of the traveller, for he makes the Bastard in " King John," 
when he has obtained royal favour, take delight in the prospect 
of the same entertainment. But in Shakespeare's mind the idea 
ripens into a complete picture of well-fed satisfaction, conde- 
scension, obsequiousness, and rambling after-dinner talk (" King 
John," i. I, 190). 



III. — Certain Qualities of his Poetry. 

The most general reader is impressed by the width of Shake- 
speare's range through varied effects of strength, pathos, and 
humour : and minute methodical reading brings an increase of 
admiration. It must not, however, be supposed that Shakespeare's 
poetry embraces all the qualities to be found in all other poets — 
that every effect producible by poetry on the human spirit finds 
its most conspicuous exemphfication in his plays. He fills us 
with wonder, with submissive awe, with heroic energy ; he runs 
us through the gamut of tears and laughter, smiling and sadness : 
no mortal man has struck so many different notes ; yet with all 
his marvellous versatility, he had his own individual touch, and 
he left an inexhaustible variety of notes to be sounded. Shake- 
speare was a man of wonderful range ; but his plays are not a 
measure of the effects that lie within the compass of poetic 
language. 

The might that Shakespeare excels in expressing is not the 
might of slow and regular agencies, but the might of swift and 
confounding agencies. His power is figured in the boast of 
Prospero — 

"To the dread rattling thunder 
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak 
With his own bolt." 

The awful energies that he sets in motion move with lightning 
swiftness and overpowering suddenness : the subUme influence 
does not soar and sail above us ; it comes about our senses, flash- 
ing and crackling, dazzling and confounding, like Jove's own bolt. 
His words pass over us like the burst and ear-deafening voice of 
the oracle over Cleomenes, surprising the hearer into nothingness ; 



CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 2/9 

or flame before our amazed eyes like the sight-outrunning activity 
of Ariel on board the king's ship in the tempest. Milton's subhm- 
ity has not the same hfe, the same magic energy : it is stateher 
and less intimate : the effect is not so sudden and overwhelming. 
There is an excitement akin to madness in the swiftly concen- 
trated energy of some of Shakespeare's occasional bursts. Lear's 
curses are quivering with compressed force — 

" All the stored vengeances of heaven fall 
On her ungrateful top ! Strike her young bones, 
Ye taking airs, with lameness ! " 

And again — 

"Now all the plagues that in the pendulous air 
Hang fated o'er men's faults liglit on thy daughters ! " 

There is a similar half-maddening excitement compressed, as it 
were, with strong hand, but trembling on the verge of frantic 
explosion, in Lucrece's invocation of Night — 

" O comfort-killing Night, image of hell ! 

Dim register and notary of shame ! 
Black stage for tragedies and murders fell ! 

Vast sin-concealing chaos ! nurse of blame ! 

Blind muffled bawd ! dark harbour for defame ! 
Grim cave of death ! whispering conspirator 
With close-tongued treason and the ravisher." 

Claudio's anticipation of the horrors of death (" Measure for 
Measure," iii. i, ii8), Lady Macbeth's invocation (i. 5, 40), Cal- 
phurnia's description of the portents ("Julius Caesar," ii. 2, 13), 
Othello's imprecation on himself (v. 2, 277), are pregnant with 
a similar energy. Such passages are few and far between, as in a 
volcanic country you find many grandeurs with supreme accumu- 
lations here and there. In Macbeth's dark hints to his wife about 
the plot to murder Banquo, the sublime passion is calmer and less 
thrilling, but there is a lurking devil of swift excitability even in 
that lofty passage : — 

" Macb. There's comfort yet; they are assailable : 
Then be thou jocund; ere the bat hath flown 
His cloister'd flight, ere to black Hecat's summons 
The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums 
Hath rung night's yawning peal, there shall be done 
A deed of dreadful note. 

Lady Macb. What's to be done? 

Macb. Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, 
Till thou applaud the deed. Come, seeling night, 
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day; 
And with thy bloody and invisible hand 
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond 



280 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

"Which keeps me pale ! Light thickens; and the crow 
Makes wing to the rooky wood : 
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse; 
While night's black agents to their preys do rouse." 

I am not aware that any passage can be quoted from Shake- 
speare with the composed, stately, sustained grandeur of Mihon's 
description of Satan : Shakespeare's subHme agencies do not move 
with the same massive dignity — they are instinct with quick hfe 
and motion, and their change of attitude is hke Hghtning. The 
planetary Miltonic grandeur was not, indeed, suited to his pur- 
poses as a dramatist. A Satan of Miltonic dignity put upon the 
stage must have appeared more or less of a bombast Tamburlaine. 
Caesar, " the foremost man of all this world," who, as Casca mock- 
ingly said, " bestrode the narrow world like a Colossus," and who, 
as he said himself, was " constant as the northern star," is Shake- 
speare's nearest approach to Miltonic grandeur of conception ; 
but the grandeur is not sustained as in Milton, it is made up by 
momentary glances of the poet's swift-ranging imagination. Othello 
is grand with a volcanic grandeur : he is easily moved ; he blazes 
out suddenly with such commands as — 

*' Hold, for your lives ! 

He that stirs next to carve for his own rage 
Holds his soul light; he dies upon his motion." 

Henry V. was a favourite with the poet, and the prologue to the 
play where he appears, after shaking off the base contagious clouds 
that smothered up his beauty from the world, is conceived in a 
spirit of swelling sublimity ; but mark the nature and attitude of 
the powers held in reserve by the mighty monarch — 

" O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend 
The brightest heaven of invention ! 
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act 
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene ! 
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself 
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels 
LeasK'd in like hounds, should famine, swoj'd, and fire 
Crouch for eviployment" 

In accordance with this characteristic, Shakespeare's descrip- 
tions of storms and tempests, or the dread witching hour with 
devilry in the mysterious background ; of hurly-burly, riot, and 
confusion, or vague impending terrors ; of hell let loose or hell 
pent up and stealthily preparing to spring out, — are far and away 
incomparable. Description is more in the way of the epic poet 
than of the dramatist ; but the dramatist also, even in the modern 
drama, often has occasion to describe what his personages saw before 



CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 28 1 

they made their appearance on the stage. Shakespeare loses no 
opportunity for description. Sometimes, as in the beginning of 
the Second Act of " Othello," he makes personages on the stage 
describe with vivid effect what they see taking place behind the 
scenes — the struggle of vessel after vessel on a fiercely tempestuous 
sea. In " Pericles," he brings a storm as it were on the stage, 
asking the audience to imagine the stage to be the deck of the 
sea-tost mariners, and making his personages speak and act as if 
on shipboard. The scene (" Pericles," iii. i ) is one of Shakespeare's 
most magnificent passages. 

Storms in the social world, "the grapphng vigour and rough 
frown of war," were large elements in the Elizabethan drama, and 
Shakespeare entered into them with delighted energy. The 
various circumstances of war are described in his historical plays 
with a spirit and vividness that one might expect from a 
professional man of blood, possessed with the habitual fierceness 
of M. Taine's typical EHzabethan. His imagination revelled in 
the scenic glories and horrors of invasion and conflict. The 
picture of the invading army in " Richard II." ii. 3, 95 — 

" Frighting the pale-faced villages with war 
And ostentation of despised arms" — 

carries his peculiar thrill in its compressed force : and there is a 
still more unhinging panic-striking energy in the announcement 
made to King John (v. i, 35) — 

"And wild amazement hurries up and down 
The little number of your doubtful friends." 

He describes the night watch before the battle with the dreadful 
note of preparation ("Henry V." iv.. Prologue), and the bloody 
field after the batde (" Henry V." iv. 7, 74). The actual horrors 
of extended conflict he would not seem to have realised minutely, 
or to have considered fitted for narration, except in such special 
episodes as the death of York and Suffolk (" Henry V." iv. 6). 
Conflict on the large scale he expressed in vague powerful figures, 
such as the following in a speech of the Bastard's (" King John," 
ii. I, 350) — 

" Ha, majesty ! how high thy glory towers, 
When the rich blood of kings is set on fire ! 
O, now doth Death line his dead chaps with steel : 
The swords of soldiers are his teeth, his fangs : 
And now he feasts, mousing the flesh of men 
In undetermined differences of kings. 
Why stand these royal fronts amazed thus? 
Cry ' havoc !' kings; back to the stained field 
You equal potents, fiery kindled spirits ! 
Then let confusion of one part confirm 
The other's peace; till then, blows, blood, and death ! " 



282 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE *. 

So much for scenic grandeurs, which are but accidents in the 
drama ; let us look now at spiritual grandeurs, which are the 
dramatic pith and essence. One main function of the drama is 
to conceive and express the storms of the individual 'heart under 
all the variety of passions that stir it to the depths — love, 
jealousy, despair, revenge, ambition. These storms may arise 
under endless variety of condition?, and we require of the 
dramatist not only adequate energy of expression but a certain 
truth to nature in the origin and fluctuation of passion : the 
passion must neither arise nor change without just motive. As 
the passion transcends nature, so may — indeed, so must — the 
motive : but the relation between the two must not outrage 
nature. In this correspondence between the motive and the 
passion consists dramatic truth : dramatic subtlety is shown 
chiefly in the fluctuations of passion. It is Shakespeare's supreme 
pre-eminence to combine this truth and subtlety with incompar- 
able energy of expression. 

Many people believe that there is hardly a situation in life that 
cannot be paralleled from Shakespeare : and, curiously enough, 
this contrast between physical and spiritual commotions is 
definitely expressed by one of his dramatic creatures, and the 
spiritual declared to be the more impressive. In " King John " 
(v. 2, 40), Lewis replies as follows to Salisbury's agitation and 
conflict of spirit at following the banners of his country's in- 
vader : — 

" A noble temper dost thou show in this : 
And great affections, wresthng in thy bosom, 
Doth make an earthquake of nobihty. 



My heart hath melted at a lady's tears, 

Being an ordinary inundation ; 

But this effusion of such manly drops, 

This shower, blown up by tempest of the soul, 

Startles mine eyes, and makes me more amazed 

Than had I seen the vaulty top of heaven 

Figured quite o'er with burning meteors." 

Bacon wondered why a woman's eye should be so gazed at when 
the beauties of the heavens were so litde regarded. That 
wonder spoke the philosopher no less unmistakably than the 
above passage speaks the dramatist. Human passion affected him 
more than the grandest phenomena of inanimate nature. 

No poet has approached Shakespeare in imagining and express- 
ing the tempest raised in the soul by supernatural apparitions. 
This is another aspect of his power over the expression of wild, 
swift-thriUing excitement. Macbeth's agitation after his first 
interview with the witches, his quivering horror and hoarse cries 



CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 283 

before the ghost of Banquo, the suppressed dehrium of Hamlet's 
first address to the ghost of his father, exhibit the poet's power in 
its maturity, when art moves with the freedom of instinct, and 
imagination and expression go together with hand loosely in hand. 
Clarence's dream (" Richard III.," i. 4, 43) is an earher effort, and 
more commonplace in conception ; but the apparition of Edward, 
a swift interlacing of heaven and hell, has the inexpressible 
Shakespearian thrill. 

The fierce passions of the fight, the fiery exhortations of 
excited leaders, ferocious teeth-grinding challenge and indignant 
defiance, infuriated pursuit and savage standing at bay, are 
prominent in several of Shakespeare's plays. We must not, 
however, suppose that his imagination worked to gratify a blood- 
sucking disposition, a savage thirst for wounds and falls, and 
agonised contortions, the delight of strong nerves in drums, 
trumpets, the clash of swords and shields, the discharge of 
small-arms and cannon, the hurried movements of charge and 
retreat. Mere warlike enthusiasm, the thirst for fighting and 
glory, is never more than a subordinate passion in his dramas. 
Its various moods — its hardy aspiration " to pluck bright honour 
from the pale-faced moon" (" i Henry IV.," i. 3, 201) ; its eager 
revelling in the anticipated combat (" i Henry IV.," iv. i, iii) ; 
its delight in the most deafening sounds of war {" King John," ii. 
I, 372); its contemptuous braving of the enemy ("King John," 
V. 2, 130) — are rendered with the greatest spirit in the speeches 
of the hot-headed, "wasp-stung and impatient," Hotspur, and the 
strong humorous soldier of fortune, Faulconbridge. When the 
warlike fit is on him. Hotspur is the very incarnation of the 
demon of war, the unmistakable son of Bellona : he speaks plain 
cannon-fire and breathes cannon-smoke : in his dreams he mutters 
words of encouragement to his horse, and his face is strained with 
phantom effect. But both Hotspur and the Bastard are exhibited 
to the audience rather as characters, or, as they were then called, 
" humours," than heroes. Hotspur's uncontrollable ardour is 
snubbed sarcastically by his uncle and his father, and his fire- 
eating propensities generally are ridiculed by the more versatile 
Prince Harry. And similarly, when the Bastard, a more robust 
warrior than Percy, gives his bragging message to the King of 
France, he is called a scold, and contemptuously interrupted by 
the rattle of drums. Achilles and Ajax, the champions of the 
Greeks, are mere fighting machines, senseless blocks, coarse and 
insolent as buffaloes. Coriolanus and Antony, who go to battle 
like the war-horse of the Bible, are moved by nobler passions than 
the savage instinct for bringing their strength to the trial of 
mortal combat. Shakespeare, while he recognised the nobility of 
the soldier's aspiration — 



284 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

" To win renown 
Even in the jaws of danger and of death " — 

had a most civilised contempt for the causeless exercise of brute 
force. 

A spirit of deeper and more bitter fierceness is shown by men 
that fight not for the mere love of fighting, but in defence of in- 
sulted honour, or in support of incensed hatred. The cross accusa- 
tions and challenges of Bolingbroke and Mowbray in the First 
Act of '' Richard II." are an example. The two enemies assail 
each other with indignant words before the King, such terms pass- 
ing between them as " traitor and miscreant," " pale trembhng 
coward," " a slanderous coward and a villain." Gages are thrown 
and taken up, when the King and Gaunt interfere to keep the 
peace. " Cousin," says the King to Bolingbroke, " throw up your 
gage; do you begin." Bolingbroke refuses — 

" O God defend my soul from such deep sin ! 
Shall I seem crest-fallen in my father's sight? 
Or with pale beggar fear impeach my height 
Before this out-dared bastard? Ere my tongue 
Shall wound my honour with such feeble wrong, 
Or sound so base a parle, my teeth shall tear 
The slavish motive of recanting fear 
And spit it bleeding in his high disgrace 
Where shame doth harbour, ev'n in Mowbray's face." 

This indomitable ferocity is from the politic and normally 
self- restrained Bolingbroke : no wonder that M. Taine found it 
difiicult to see the soft moods of such a character. In the hsts, 
however, when their hatred is settling into their arms and their 
tongues are correspondingly relieved, their mutual defiance is 
perceptibly milder : they take their stations no less gaily than two 
duellists from the Court of Louis XIV. The ferocity of speech is 
left for the impatient onlooker, old Gaunt : the combatants go to 
mortal battle — 

** As gentle and as jocund as to gest." 

— Richard II., i. 3, 60-90. 

Warlike fury becomes most impressive, and demands the utmost 
strain of imagination to give it deep and full body, when it 
rises out of the decay of hope, when the soldier's arm is his last 
refuge against the falling off of friends and the thickening troops 
of enemies. It is when the warrior is baited like Macbeth, or 
hunted like Richard, or caught in the toils like Antony, that the 
war passion concentrates for a burst of supreme energy, quickening 
the most peaceful pulses and thrilling the least combustible nerves 
with sympathetic fire. In the case of Richard, indeed, there is 
less propriety in the word concentration ; — 



CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 285 

" Let's to 't pell-mell, 
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell " — 

is a resolution that mounts very little above his uniform leve) 
of dare-devilry. We are conscious of hardly any rise of temperature 
in Richard till we reach the peremptory savage fury of his last 
moments, and he can hardly be said to concentrate, to bend up, 
his energies for this culmination of rage — it is only that the 
exasperation of circumstances has blown his normal fiendishness 
to a white heat. His energies are maintained throughout at a 
fiendish pitch : he was created when the young dramatist had not 
ventured on deep fluctuations. With Macbeth the supreme mo- 
ment comes when the promise is explained away that had before 
steeled him with a trust in invulnerable destiny. For a moment 
the stripping off of that supernatural protection cows his better 
part of man, but it is only a momentary crouch : there is a depth 
beneath undrawn : and what condensed firmness and ferocity there 
is in his bearing when he towers up and fronts Macduff with his 
last defiance — 

" I will not yield, 
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet, 
And to be baited with the rabble's curse, 
Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane, 
And thou opposed, being of no woman born. 
Yet I will try the last. Before my body 
I throw my warlike shield," &c. 

In the " old ruffian," the magnanimous " sworder," Antony, 
when hemmed in like a lion by overpowering numbers, the spirit 
mounts above the dark fierceness of despair. He goes to battle 
with savage laughter : his bloodthirsty ferocity is strangely tem- 
pered with sweetness, if not with light. Bewitched by his passion 
for Cleopatra, he has let slip opportunity after opportunity till the 
final struggle can be delayed no longer : he rouses himself perforce 
and puts forth his strength to show the world that — 

" 'Tis better playing with a lion's whelp, 
Than with an old one dying." 

His talk with Cleopatra at the banquet on the evening before 
his last effort, is a fine illustration of Shakespeare's bold and sure 
treatment of the stormiest passions. The dramatist takes on the 
situation as it were instinctively : the words seem to come by 
spontaneous impulse. Antony's last " gaudy night " is no carousal 
to drown care : no effort to forget the coming morrow. War is 
not excluded from the banquet : on the contrary, he is the guest 
of the evening : he sits on Antony's right, while Love is on the 
left. 

Akin to martial rage is fiery invective, the warfare of the tongue, 



286 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

the last resource of women and misanthropes, of oppressed Mar- 
garets and soured Timons. Amidst the circle of tearful afflicted 
women bereaved by the multiplied villanies of Richard III., 
Margaret stands out with irrepressible fierceness flashing through 
and burning up her tears, husbandless, childless, friendless, utterly 
impotent, but indomitable. In her young and beautiful days, 
when Suffolk brought her from France as " nature's miracle," to 
be the wife of King Henry, she gave ample proof that she was a 
woman of spirit. She came among Henry's mutinous nobles and 
haughty ladies with an imperial resolution to be no nominal queen. 
She bitterly resented the king's unmanliness. She boxed the ears 
of the proud wife of Gloucester. When Henry weakly made over 
the succession to the Duke of York, she took the field in behalf of 
her defrauded son ; defeated York and took him prisoner ; dipped 
a handkerchief in the blood of the boy Rutland, and offered it to 
the captive father to wipe his eyes with. She stabbed York with 
her own hand. Such was the beautiful "she-wolf of France," the 
" tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide," in the prime of her 
youth. In "Richard III.," she reappears withered and wrinkled, 
bereft of husband, son, and every vestige of power ; but neither 
age nor misfortune can quench her fiery energy. She is turned all 
to envenomed bitterness, hungry for revenge, "well skilled in 
curses," never opening her mouth save to give passage to " the 
breath of bitter words." No hope but the hope of revenge survives 
to detain her longer in England. Herself impotent, she hangs 
about the Court to ease her heart with curses, and pray that her 
eyes may see revenge ; she Hes in wait for opportunities of chilling 
the prosperous with prophecies of pain and ruin, and adding with 
her bitter tongue to the miseries of the wretched. When poor 
Elizabeth, the wife of dying Edward, exclaims — "Small joy have 
I in being England's queen," Margaret enters behind with the 
bitter addition — 

" And lessened be that small, God, I beseech thee ! 
Thy honour, state, and seat is due to me." 

Richard alone is a match for her. He treats her curses with 
humorous indifference. She assails him with a torrent of incom- 
parably savage epithets — " elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog," 
"slander of thy mother's heavy womb," &c., — and he takes even 
her breath away for a moment by coolly completing the curse with 
her own name. But her hard bitter spirit encounters no such 
check, and moves on with triumphant volubility in the incom- 
parable scene (" Richard III." iv. 4), where she intrudes upon the 
prostrate mourners Elizabeth and the Duchess of York. This was 
one of Shakespeare's earlier efforts ; but he never again equalled 
the concentrated bitter fierceness of this she-wolf's hunger for 



CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 28/ 

revenge, fiendish laughter over its partial accomplishment, and 
savage prayer for its completion. Words could not hiss and sting 
with more envenomed intensity than in the speech that she con- 
cludes with the prayer for Richard's death — 

" Cancel his bond of life, clear God, I pray, 
That I may live to say, The dog is dead." 

The general misanthropy of Timon is a. more massive feeling 
than Margaret's sharp and piercing special hatred and keen hunger 
for revenge, the rage of a tigress robbed of her whelps. There 
is the difference between them that there is between piercing per- 
sonal invective and large denunciations of universal depravity. 
There is a grandeur in Timon's misanthropy, as there was in the 
imperial munificence of his better days : his feelings at no time 
are in the common roll : there is a largeness of heart about him, 
an impassioned superiority to ordinary prudence and ordinary 
sobriety of judgment. His affections move not in petty rivulets 
within severely restraining bounds of intellect : their motion is 
oceanic. When he was rich he gave about him without a thought 
of consequences, and without the faintest suspicion of human 
honesty and gratitude ; and when the scales are plucked rudely 
from his eyes, and friend after friend in quick succession proves 
ungrateful, his impetuous tide of disgust is too powerful to receive 
the slightest check from the arguments of temperate judgment. 
From first to last he is a creature of unreasoning impulse and 
passion. 

The surest evidence that a dramatist has taken hold of the 
complete body of a strong passion is seen in his representation of 
its transfiguring power. The power of strong feeling to transfigure 
and distort, to make foul things seem fair to the impassioned 
vision and fair things foul, is a very familiar fact, understood to a 
certain depth by the most ordinary novelist. Almost anybody 
could have conceived the perversion of the brave o'erhanging fir- 
mament by the force of melancholy into a foul and pestilent con- 
gregation of vapours. But there are much more startling and 
sweeping transfigurations wrought by the fire of passion among 
Shakespeare's characters. One of the most striking is the revela- 
tion of his mother's guilt by Hamlet in the closet scene (" Ham- 
let," iii. 4, 40). In the rising frenzy of his moral indignation, all 
nature seems to join with the avenger in flaming horror and hid- 
eous disgust at the monstrosity of the crime : — 

" Heaven's face doth glow; 
Yea, this solidity and compound mass, 
With tristful visage as against the doom 
Is thought-sick at the act." 



288 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

But for a sudden marvellous leap of passion even this shudder- 
ing frenzy is inferior in power to Isabella's fierce rejection of the 
unworthy proposals of Angelo (" Measure for Measure," ii. 4, 100). 

But if Shakespeare is supreme in angry invective, he is equally 
supreme in the expression of the impassioned transports of love. 
The whole soul agitated by love was no less at his command : the 
tumults and steady raptures, the sudden bursts and overwhelming 
tides of absorbing passion, whether of hatred or of love, found in 
him an understanding heart and a copious tongue. His two great 
love tragedies, " Romeo and Juliet," and "Antony and Cleopatra," 
certainly not inferior to the greatest of his works, were a sufficient 
peace-offering to Venus for his disparagement of her power in his 
sonnets and his "Two Gentlemen of Verona" : they recanted his 
trifling with friendship as a master-passion, and laid the strongest 
ties of kindred and ambition at the feet of the all-powerful god- 
dess. Juliet may for a moment be angry with Romeo for the 
death of her kinsman Tybalt, but her whole soul is up in arms 
when she hears the words, " Shame come to Romeo ! " — 

" Blistered be thy tongue 
For such a wish ! He was not born to shame : 
Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit; 
For 'tis a throne where honour may be crowned 
Sole monarch of the universal earth ! " 

There is a fine contrast throughout between the two pairs of lovers, 
Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra. Juliet's fiery brevity 
and flashing sublime splendour is no less in keeping with her vir- 
gin youth, than is the magnificent torrent of hyperboles with which 
the passionate Queen of Egypt deifies her paramour characteristic 
of her meretricious maturity and experience. In vain poor Dola- 
bella makes polite efforts to be heard : there is no resisting the 
tide of Cleopatra's eloquence — 

" Cleo. I dreamed there was an Emperor Antony : 

O, such another sleep, that I might see 

But such another man ! 

Dol. If it might please ye 

Cleo. His face was as the heavens : and therein stuck 

A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted 

The little O, the earth. 

Dol. Most sovereign creature 

Cleo. His legs bestrid the ocean : his rearVl arm 

Crested the world : his voice was propertied, 

As all the tuned spheres: and that to friends; 

But when he meant to quail and shake the orb, 

He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty 

There was no winter in't; an autumn 'twas 

That grew the more by reaping : his delights 



CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 289 

Were dolphin-like; they show'd his back above 
The element they lived in : in his livery 
Walk'd crowns and crownets ; realms and islands were 
As plates dropp'd from his pocket." 

Shakespeare was just such a servant as Venus loves ; not too 
tamely obedient and reverential, often breaking loose in fits of 
capricious mockery and flat contradiction, yet every now and 
again giving unequivocal tokens of respect. So perfect was his 
mastery over the language of genuine passion, that he was never 
afraid to bring it into contrast with mock hyperbole or unsenti- 
mental worldliness. His sympathies with Biron, Benedick, Mer- 
cutio, and Diomede, did not prevent him from giving earnest 
expression to the soaring raptures of the youthful lovers, Romeo 
and Troilus. Even the mocking Biron himself is touched with 
the sacred flame, and renders homage to the power of his divinity 
in verses of dazzling magnificence ("Love's Labour Lost," iv. 3, 
231). But though Biron raises his divinity to a dazzling height, 
and draws a fine scenic picture of her majesty, his transports are 
formal compared with the agonised soul's hunger of Troilus, stalk- 
ing about Cressid's door — 

" Like a strange soul upon the Stygian banks 
Staying for waftage." 

And all other lovers' raptures must yield to the world-absorbing 
passion of Romeo in the Sixth Scene of the Second Act, where the 
violent delights of the lovers are approaching their culmination — 

** Friar. So smile the heavens upon this holy act, 
That after hours with sorrow chide us not ! 

Rom. Amen, amen ! but come what sorrow can, 
It cannot countervail the exchange of joy 
That one short minute gives me in her sight : 
Do thou but close our hands with holy words, 
Then love-devouring death do what he dare ; 
It is enough I may but call her mine." 

The dazzling and confounding power of the sudden apparition 
of beauty is described with inspired zeal in the unexpected out- 
burst of the merry lord, Biron. But Biron's description of the 
majesty of his mistress is surpassed in idolatrous elevation and 
enraptured homage by Cassio's welcome to Desdemona (" Othello," 

ii. I, Zi). 

" O, behold, 
The riches of the ship is come on shore ! 
Ye men of Cyprus, let her have your knees. 
Hail to thee, lady ! and the grace of heaven, 
Before, behind thee, and on every hand, 
Enwheel thee round I " 



290 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

Such a reception is worthy of the lady " that paragons description, 
and wild fame." When, however, the poet has to describe the 
power of more than mortal charms, he surpasses his wildest 
tributes to mortal beauty. Oberon's account of the effects of 
the mermaid's song (" Midsummer Night's Dream," ii. i, 148) 
dwindles all other hyperboles into meanness — 

" My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou rememberest 
Since once I sat upon a promontory, 
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back 
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, 
That the rude sea grew civil at her song, 
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres 
To hear the sea-maid's music." 

In all these passages the energy is swift and darting, with here 
and there a momentary poise or slowing of speed, as it dwells on 
some revelation of spiritual or scenic grandeur. There is no end 
to the variety of movement, no bounds to its range : it ascends to 
the most passionate heaven of love, and enters with equal zest the 
gloomiest hell of hatred and desperate fury, of bitter curses and 
set teeth. But wherever the energy goes, it goes swiftly. It does 
not wait calmly to gather body and proceed with quietly over- 
bearing stateliness : when checked, it rages impatiently, and pierces 
irresistibly through all impediments. 

This is the general character of the strength of Shakespeare's 
genius. We must not, however, allow this dazzling movement of 
lightnings in the atmosphere of his tragedies to blind us to the 
vast firmament that overhangs the whole, and displays itself in 
quiet grandeur when the hurly-burly of conflicting passions has 
stormed itself to rest. The poet recognises an overruhng Destiny 
above all the tumult. It is not a cold remote power of marble 
majesty: it is represented (Sonnet 115) as being in intimate con- 
nection with human affairs — 

'* Reckoning Time, whose million'd accidents 
Creep in 'twixt vows and change decrees of kings, 
Tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp'st intents, 
Divert strong minds to the course of altering things." 

Nothing is more remarkable in Shakespeare's plays, and nothing 
contributes more to make them a faithful image of life, than the 
prominence given to the influence of chance, of undesigned acci- 
dents. The most tragic events turn on the most trifling circum- 
stances. The fate of Richard II. is traced to a momentary im- 
pulse. When Bolingbroke and Mowbray are mounted for the 
encounter, and waiting for the signal to charge, the king on a 
sudden thought throws down his warder, stops the fight, and sends 



CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 29I 

the combatants into exile. That impulse cost him kingdom and 
life (" 2 Henry IV.," iv. i, 125) — 

" O when the king did throw his warder down, 
His own life hung upon the staff he threw." 

Poor Desdemona's fate hangs on the accidental dropping of a 
handkerchief. The unhappy deaths of Romeo and Juliet are the 
result of the miscarriage of a letter. " The most noble blood of 
all this world " might not have been spilt untimely had Caesar not 
postponed reading the schedule of Artemidorus. Wolsey fell from 
the full meridian of his glory through a single slight inadvertence : 
one fatal shp which not all his deep sagacity could redeem. But 
the predominance of chance over human designs is m.ost power- 
fully brought home in the tragedy of " Hamlet," whose fate turns 
on accident after accident. The passage just quoted from the son- 
nets reads as a commentary on the fortunes of Hamlet, and should 
be printed in the beginning of all copies of the play, to induce 
the lofty vein of reflection designed by the poet as the main effect 
of the whole, and to undo the wretched criticism that would de- 
grade it to the level of a sermon against procrastination. The poet 
leaves us in no doubt as to his intention, although one might 
easily have apprehended it from his treatment of slight turning- 
points and weak beginnings of things in other plays. In the 
Second Scene of the last Act, Hamlet tells Horatio how accident- 
ally and how rashly he discovered the treachery of Rosencranz 
and Guildenstern. He lay sleepless in his cabin, when an impulse 
took him to rise and rob them of their packet — 

" Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting, 
That would not let me sleep; methought I lay 
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly, 
And praised be rashness for it, let us know, 
Our iitdiscretion somet'unes serves us well 
When our deep plots do pall ; and that should teach us 
There's a divinity that shapes our ends, 
Rough-hew them how we will." 

That is Shakespeare's poetical religion : a power variously 
denominated Destiny, Fate, Chance, Providence — supreme over 
mortal affairs. The varied energies of the world, which no man 
has ever embodied with such force and subtlety of conception and 
expression, are governed and shut in by great sublimities of time 
and space. Read his sonnets and mark how frequently his medi- 
tations fall into this vein — 

" When I consider everything that grows 
Holds in perfection but a little moment, 
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows 
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment." 



292 WILLl7\M SHAKESPEARE I 

It is the stars that guide our moving, that govern our conditions. 
But nothing can preserve us against " confounding age's cruel 

knife" — 

" Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore, 
So do our minutes hasten to their end." 

Sometimes his spirit revolts against the tyranny of Time and Fate. 
He imparts fresh vigour to the commonplace boast that the record 
of his love shall outlive ruin and decay. At other moments, the 
relentless march of time is evidently disquieting to him, and he 
seems ready to cry with his own Henry IV. (iii. i, 45) — 

" O God ! that one might read the Book of Fate 
And see the revolution of the times 
Make mountains level, and the continent 
Weary of solid Jirmness, melt itself 
Into the sea ! and, other times, to see 
The beachy girdle of the oeean 
Too wide for Neptune's hips; hoio chances mock, 
And changes Jill the cup of alteration 
With divers liquors ! Oh, if this were seen, 
The happiest youth, viewing his progress through, 
What perils past, what crosses to ensue, 
Would shut the book, and sit him down and die." 

The thought of Destiny expands the sadness of tragic conclu- 
sions to more voluminous dimensions and invests them with a softer 
complexion : conducting the living river of tears to the ocean, 
carrying the visible smoke of sighs into the vague all-embracing 
air. But apart from this thought, the tendency of all tragic 
agitation is to subside into the calm of sadness. The fiercest 
storms of passion wear a sad look when viewed from the repose of 
the conclusion. Even the arrogance of Coriolanus and the heady 
impetuosity of Hotspur make us shake the head when we see the 
curtain fall on their dead bodies, and go back in imagination to 
the powerful manner of their life. Think of the warm rhapsodies 
of Romeo and JuHet, intoxicated by " the strong new wine of 
love," when you see them lying before the tomb of the Capulets, 
and you cannot keep your heart from filling. 

The pathos of sad conclusions is the proper pathos of tragedy. 
Not till all is over are we suffered to lapse into the attitude of 
sadness. If an agent of prime importance gives way under the 
blows of outrageous fortune, is utterly bereft of hope, whether in 
his own powers or in external aid, as happens in " Henry VIII." 
to Wolsey, — we are not permitted to linger over his downfall — we 
must on with the march of events till the play is played out. The 
dramatist must not induce us to yield to the fascination of passing 
calamities : we may follow him with tears in our eyes as we 



CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 293 

glance backward on fallen idols, but to persevere in a worship of 
sorrow before the play is ended, would be a course of undramatic 
stubbornness. 

If we detach individual lives from the rich interdependent com- 
plexity of a play, the pathetic moment, the moment seized upon 
by the mind under the fascination of pity, is analogous to the 
close of the Fifth Act — is the end of some great hope, or of all 
hope, the moment of special or general despair. So long as the 
spirit is militant against calamity, it appeals to the sympathies of 
the energetic ; not until it succumbs does it claim the sympathy of 
the sad. Dido with the willow in her hand, the pale forsaken 
maid " shrieking undistinguished woe " — 

" Tearing of papers, breaking rings atwain, 
Storming her world with sorrow's wind and rain " — 

are pathetic objects, on which we dwell with sorrow undisturbed 
by forward-looking excitement : their drama is ended, they are 
beyond the reach of aid ; there is no prospect of deliverance to 
hold us in suspense. Ariadne passioning for the perjury and cruel 
flight of Theseus is an object of pathetic meditation only when we 
look beyond her bitter hours of desertion to her final deliverance : 
if we vividly realise the moment when she first discovers her lov- 
er's perjury, and cries desperately for help, we are too much dis- 
turbed by anger and anxiety to wrap ourselves up in heavy folds 
of sadness. 

Individual lives may be dwelt upon with least abnegation of 
rich general effects, in the historical plays, which are more loosely 
woven together ; and the case of Constance in " King John " is 
one of the finest of our dramatist's studies of heart-broken women. 
When the message is brought to her that the King of France has 
abandoned her quarrel and compounded peace with England, she 
is fitful and capricious in her sorrow, but her spirit does not fail : 
her sorrows are proud : and when the kings enter, she rises up 
and assails them with acrimonious accusations of oppression and 
perjury. Margaret herself is not more skilled in curses, more 
instinct with the breath of bitter words. When, however, Arthur 
is taken prisoner, her defiance breaks down ; and she walks about 
invoking Death, with dishevelled hair — 

" Look, who comes here ! a grave unto a soul; 
Holding the eternal spirit against her will 
In the vile prison of atflicted breath." 

" Patience, good lady ! " says Philip, tenderly ; " comfort, gentle 
Constance ! " But there is no comfort for her. 

"No, I defy all counsel, all redress, 
But that which ends all counsel, true redress, 



294 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

Death, death; O amiable, lovely Death! 
Thou odoriferous stench ! sound rottenness ! 
Arise forth from the couch of lasting night 
Thou hate and terror to posterity, 
And I will kiss thy detestable bones 
And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows. 
And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust, 
And be a carrion monster like thyself: 
Come grin on me, and I will think thou smilest, 
And bless thee as thy wife. Misery's love, 
O, come to me ! " 

Grief has full possession of her ; all thoughts of redress and 
revenge have died out ; bitterness is transfigured into ecstatic 
sweetness. Deeply touched by her passion, Philip pleads — 

" O fair affliction, peace ! " 

But this only gives a new motive to her outcries, supplies new 
fuel to the chemistry that converts every thought, word, and sight 
into images of despair. 

"No, no, I will not, having breath to cry; 

that my tongue were in the thunder's mouth ! 
Then with a passion would I shake the world; 
And rouse from sleep that fell anatomy 
Which cannot hear a lady's feeble voice, 
Which scorns a modern invocation." 

Philip tells her that this is madness ; whereupon she wishes that 
she were mad if thereby she might " madly think a babe of clouts 
were he." Then he also gives way to piteous fancies, unable 
longer to comfort her with formal words of compassion and 
consolation : — 

" Bind up those tresses. O, what love I note 
In the fair multitude of those her hairs ! 
Where but by chance a silver drop hath fallen, 
Even to that drop ten thousand wiry friends 
Do glue themselves in sociable grief, 
Like true, inseparable, faithful loves 
Sticking together in calamity." 

She hears him as if she heard him not, and says mechanically and 
incoherently — "To England, if you will." He repeats, "Bind up 
your hairs," recalling her to his meaning. She rouses herself, and 
instantly turns this also into a mournful symbol : — 

"Yes, that I will; and wherefore will I do it? 

1 tore them from their bonds and cried aloud 
' O that these hands could so redeem my son 
As they have given these hairs their liberty ! ' 
But now I envy at their liberty. 

And will again commit them to their bonds 
Because my poor child is a prisoner." 



CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 295 

To my mind Shakespeare's mastery over keys of sadness is the 
most memorable side of his mighty genius. His intimate knowl- 
edge of the sorrows of women is hardly more remarkable than 
the varieties of pathos in his representations of unfortunate kings 
and ministers. Richard II., Henry VL, Gloucester, and Wolsey 
bear the crush of misfortune each in different spirit, characteristic 
of their several frames of mind. There is a certain mournful 
gaiety in Richard's demeanour in accordance with his magnani- 
mous dignity and indifference to life : he says farewell to his 
queen with exquisite tenderness, yet with epithets that look like 
an ostentation of light-heartedness : — 

"Join not with grief, fair woman, do not so, 
To make my end too sudden : learn, good soul, 
To think our former state a happy dream ; 
From which awaked, the truth of what we are 
Shows us but this : I am sworn brother, sweet, 
To grim Necessity, and he and I 
Will keep a league till death.' Hie thee to France, 
And cloister thee in some religious house : 
Our holy lives must win a new world's crown, 
Which our profane hours here have stricken down." 

Of his queen he says : — 

*' She came adorned hither like sweet May. 
Sent back like Hallowmas or short'st of day." 

The weak Henry VI. pines for rest as rest : he would gladly lay 
aside the 'cares of state if only he could get in exchange the crown 
of a peaceful life : — 

" O God ! methinks it were a happy life, 
To be no better than a homely swain; 
To sit upon a hill as I do now, 
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point, 
Thereby to see the minutes how they run. 
How many make the hour full complete; 
Flow many hours bring about the day ; 
How many days will finish up the year; 
How many years a mortal man may live." 

Compare, again, Gloucester and Wolsey, in their decline and fall. 
The good Duke Humphrey is moved deeply by the degradation 
of his " sweet Nell" ; but his own fall he takes with the matter-of- 
fact callousness of an unromantic man of the world, prepared 
for reverses as the natural course of things. (" 2 Henry VI.," 
ii. 4, i) — 

"Thus sometimes hath the brightest day a cloud; 
And after summer evermore succeeds 
Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold : 
So cares and joys abound, as seasons fleet." 



296 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

Poor Wolsey, aspiring and demonstrative, the man of grand and 
studied manners, whose every pubUc act is impressive, cannot 
creep into his narrow bed so quietly : his last words touch our 
deepest feelings with the skill of a profound theatrical artist. His 
end is thus described (" Henry VIII.," iv. 2, 18) : — 

" At last, with easy roads, he came to Leicester, 
Lodged in the abbey; where the reverend abbot, 
With all his convent, honorably received him; 
To whom he gave these words — ' O^ father abbot, 
An old man, broken zvith the storms of state. 
Is come to lay his weary bones among ye ; 
Give him a little earth for charity ! ' 
So went to bed; where eagerly his sickness 
Pursued him still ; and, three nights after this, 
About the hour of eight, which he himself 
Foretold should be his last, full of repentance, 
Continual meditations, tears and sorrows, 
He gave his honours to the world again. 
His blessed part to heaven, and slept in peace." 

All these wrecks of fortune are touching, inexpressibly touching, 
but each in a way consistent with the character of the individual. 

Our poet's sympathies with humanity were wide-reaching, but 
they did not exhaust the fine energy of his imagination. The 
lower creation claimed a share of his interest ; importuned him, 
as it were, to devote some passing moments to the realisation of 
their joys and agonies. The observations of the melancholy 
Jacques on the wounded deer have always been held among the 
most prized " gems of Shakespeare ; " and none of his descriptions 
are more touching and tender than the picture of the protracted 
anxieties of the hunted hare in "Venus and Adonis" (/. 678). 

The close alliance in Shakespeare's mind between sadness and 
love is shown in the moonlight scene between Lorenzo and Jessica 
("Merchant of Venice," v. i). The lovers walk in an avenue 
under bright moonlight in perfect stillness — 

" When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, 
And they did make no noise," — 

and conjure up pictures in harmony with the scene. One of the 
pictures that the moonlight pours in upon their happy hearts is 
the sorceress Medea gathering her enchanted herbs — a conception 
in the finest harmony with the soft mysterious light of the moon. 
But the other three are pictures of sighing, ill-starred, forlorn 
lovers, Troilus, Thisbe, and Dido. The moonlight hours are 
peculiarly sacred to lovers, and their placid influence tends to 
tranquillity and sadness. Happy successful love is akin to sad- 
ness ; it is unsatisfied sighing that raises tempests in the soul, and 



CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 297 

confident hope or reckless despair that inspires to heroic deeds. 
In the moment of assured success the lover may be seated on the 
highest pinnacle of triumph, in rapture at having won the world's 
dearest possession : but triumph soon gives place to more tranquil 
joy, falls naturally into the common pathetic key of love and soft 
diffused sadness. 

Shakespeare shows in many passages his deep feeling for the 
pathos and witchery of moonlight. In the " Two Gentlemen of 
Verona" (iii. 2), Proteus thus advises Thurio — 

" Visit by night your lady's chamber-window 
"With some sweet concert; to their instruments, 
Tune a deploring dump : the night's dead silence 
Will well become such complaining grievance." 

' Who is Silvia ' sung in the still moonlight, is certainly fitted to 
ravish human sense. One can never cease to be astonished at the 
commentary of Gervinus on this most exquisite of songs ; he 
refuses to accept it as a specimen of the genuine Shakespearian 
love-lyric, and supposes it to be accommodated to the cloddy and 
stupid character of Thurio ! These exquisite strains should always 
be conceived in their original connection sounding through the 
still silvery-lighted air. Shakespeare's delight in music under such 
circumstances appears to have been ecstatic. His famous com- 
mendation of music is put into the mouth of Lorenzo in the scene 
already referred to : the musicians are introduced with the thrill- 
ing line — 

" Come, ho ! and wake Diana with a hymn " — 

and when the ears of the lovers are surfeited with sweet sounds, 
the music dies away at the softly breathed command — 

" Peace, ho ! the moon sleeps with Endymion, 
And would not be awaked." 

There are some exquisite moonlight scenes in " Midsummer Night's 
Dream." Oberon's vision of the wonderful sea-maid is granted 
him by the light of the moon ; and all the fun and pathos of 
that delightful night is transacted under the same bewitching 
luminary. 

It is a familiar law of our nature that we never admire things 
so profoundly as when we are in danger of losing them : love is 
always increased by the near prospect of separation. In the 
garden scene between Romeo and Juliet, the danger of interrup- 
tion and death to the daring youth gives a keener passion to the 
mutual confessions and protestations of the lovers, and helps to 
make this scene the finest love-passage in the whole range of our 
drama. One does not wonder that this play took London by 



298 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

Storm, and that play-goers could not open their mouths without 
talking of Juliet and Romeo. Othello's endearments to Des- 
demona before committing the fatal act, which have an inexpres- 
sible power over our deepest feelings, are a more extreme case of 
the same principle. Perhaps the most touching lines in Shake- 
speare are those beginning — " When I have plucked the rose " 
("Othello," v. 2, 13). 

Of all Shakespeare's Comedies, perhaps " Twelfth Night " is 
the most richly woven with various hues of love, serious and mock- 
heroic. The amorous threads take warmer shifting colours from 
their neighbourhood to the unmitigated remorseless merry-making 
of the harum-scarum old wag Sir Toby and his sparkling captain in 
mischief, the " most excellent devil of wit," Maria. Beside their 
loud conviviality and pitiless fun the languishing sentiment of the 
cultivated love-lorn Duke stands out seven times refined, and goes 
with exquisite touch to the innermost sensibilities. 

The two comedies most rich in scenic beauty, in dazzling play 
of fancy, are the "Tempest" and "Midsummer Night's Dream." 
The beauties of the "Tempest" are comparatively stately : dainty 
Ariel is a gentle obedient spirit, affectionately and minutely atten- 
tive to his master's behests, and these behests have a certain 
colour of Prospero's own dignity and lofty ' tenderness. The 
masque of Iris, Ceres, and Juno, unfolded to the wondering eyes 
of the young couple as an indulgent display of the magician's art, 
is a majestic vision, a richly-coloured representation of stately 
beneficence. The character of the " Tempest " is seen in Caliban's 
summation of the wonders of the island. This is one of those 
prodigal efflorescences that dazzle even the mind accustomed to 
the luxuriance of Shakespeare : it is as if the poet had exerted 
himself to gather together all the celestial effects of that astonish- 
ing play and overwhelm the senses by a sudden revelation of 
accumulated beauties ("Tempest," iii. 2, 143) : — 

" Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, 
Sounds and sweet airs, that give deHght and hurt not. 
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments 
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices 
That, if I then had waked after long sleep, 
Will make me sleep again : and then, in dreaming, 
The clouds methought would open and show riches 
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked, 
I cried to dream again." 

The " Midsummer Night's Dream " has none of this stateliness : 
it is a wild revel of fancy, " a debauch of the senses and the 
imagination." Puck, the presiding spirit, has a very different 
master from Ariel, and very different notions of duty. He is, 
indeed, "the pert and nimble spirit of mirth;" a mistake of 



CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 299 

Oberon's orders does not lie heavy on his conscience — the more 

mistakes the merrier — 

" And those things do best please me, 
That befal preposterously," 

In this play, also, there is the happiest use of contrasts. The airy 
debauch of fancy is mixed up with a debauch of farcical invention. 
The graceful delicate little shapes of the fairies, with their swift 
motions, their pretty spites and shudders, their nomad life among 
Nature's choicest treasures of form and colour, are a fine contrast 
to the hard-handed, thick-headed, honest workmen. The beauty 
as well as the fun of the piece is heightened by the earnestness of 
everybody except Puck, the chuckling contriver of so much con- 
fusion. It was not without propriety that Shakespeare put into 
this play his famous account of the seething brains and shaping 
fantasies of " the lunatic, the lover, and the poet ; " at the close of 
the story of that wonderful night, he might well reflect upon the 
nature of the poet's imagination. 

Two qualities that deeply affect Shakespeare's sense of the ludi- 
crous are conspicuous in the " Midsummer Night's Dream " — the 
essential sympathetic kindliness of his nature, and the astonishing 
swiftness of his transitions from the serious to the ridiculous point 
of view. The fine taste of Sir Philip Sidney objected to making 
sport of the mispronunciations of foreigners, as being an offensive 
assumption of superiority, and Shakespeare seems to have felt 
compunctions about laughing at the honest efforts of poor fellows 
that had never laboured in their minds before. Accordingly, the 
gentle-hearted Hippolyta is made to protest against this source of 
amusement, saying — 

" I love not to see wretchedness o'ercharged 
And duty in his service peTishing." 

And Theseus is saved from the vulgar littleness of seeking amuse- 
ment in the blunders of men anxious to do him service, by being 
made to express a greater pleasure in the modesty of fearful duty 
than in the rattling tongue of saucy and audacious eloquence. Our 
conscience is thus set at rest, and we are enabled to laugh at the 
absurdities of Pyramus, Thisbe, Wall, Moonshine, and Lion with 
genial good-nature, and without any odious contempt for the hon- 
est amateurs. 

The hghtning swiftness of Shakespeare's intellect is in nothing 
more conspicuous than in the rapidity of his transitions from the 
serious to the ludicrous, such as we have in the love-making of 
Titania to Bottom, and the translated weaver's grovelling asinine 
replies. The essence of the ludicrous is the sudden degradation 



300 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

of things or the turning of them upside down, and in the rapidit}'- 
and completeness of this operation Shakespeare is incomparable — • 
even " the merry Greek, tart Aristophanes " must yield the palm. 
Shakespeare has such variety that he never exhausts you with one 
thing : when you have laughed your fill he changes the scene, and 
does not bring you back to ludicrous conceptions till your lungs 
have been refreshed by an interval of rest. And when he is in 
the ludicrous vein, he throws his heart into it : the mischievous 
spirit of comical degradation coming upon him after a fit of 
serious creation finds him ready and willing for the wildest 
pranks. With what profane glee he upsets all the grave emotions 
proper to the piteous tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, which Chaucer 
handles with such tender sympathy among his " Legends of Good 
Women." ^ Shakespeare also could take a pathetic conception of 
Thisbe fearfully o'ertripping the dew ; but when the tale came in 
his way as a subject for comic treatment, he carried out the work 
of ludicrous subversion with pitiless completeness. He thoroughly 
enjoyed putting off the buskin and playing riotous capers in the 
sock. He might well have applied to himself part of FalstafPs 
self-complacent reflection, and said — " The brain of this foolish 
compounded clay, man, is not able to invent anything that tends 
to laughter more than I invent." The marvel is that his own 
serious conceptions were safe in his hands ; that one with so quick 
an eye for the ludicrous and so thorough an execution could allow 
his imagination to persist in a serious vein at all. This is, indeed, 
another aspect of the fundamental wonder in Shakespeare — self- 
command : command over forces that have proved absolute and 
ungovernable in every other case where they have existed in equal 
degree. 

One of the best examples of Shakespeare's extraordinary swift- 
ness in changing his point of view is found in the Second Scene of 
the Fifth Act of" Troilus and Cressida," where Troilus and Ulysses 
are eavesdropping and commenting on the behaviour of Cressida 
with Diomede, while Thersites stands behind and remarks on the 
whole situation. The comment of the impish mocker upon the 
passionate apostrophe of the indignant betrayed lover is incompar- 
ably fine : it takes us by surprise, and the more we dwell upon it^ 
the more exquisite its edge seems to be : — 

" Tro. Ay, Greek ; and that shall be divulged well ' 
In character as red as Mars his heart 
Inflamed with Venus : ne'er did young man fancy 
With so eternal and so fixed a soul. 



1 There is a full version of the story in the ' Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inven- 
tions,* not nearly so delicate as Chaucer's, and this may have been Shakespeare's 
basis. 



CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 3OI 

Hark, Greek : as much as I do Cressid love, 
So much by weight hate I her Diomed : 
That sleeve is mine that he'll bear on his helm; 
Were it a casque composed by Vulcan's skill, 
My sword should bite it : not the dreadful spout 
Which shipmen do the hurricano call, 
Constringed in mass by the almighty sun, 
Shall dizzy with more clamour Neptune's ear 
In his descent than shall my prompted sword 
Falling on Diomed. 

Ther. He'll tickle it for his concupy." 

Two of Shakespeare's comedies, the "Taming of the Shrew" 
and the " Comedy of Errors," belong mainly to the province of 
farce : they are longer, and contain more fully delineated charac- 
ters than modern farces, but their chief incidents are of the 
extravagant sort generally understood as farcical. The " Taming 
of the Shrew," indeed, is now usually acted in a curtailed form, in 
which only the more extravagant incidents are retained : and in 
this form it has all the broad effect of a boisterous afterpiece. 
It should be remarked, however, that the most farcical incidents in 
both stories — the behaviour of Petruchio in church, and the wild 
revenge taken by Antipholus on the lean-faced anatomy of the 
conjuror Pinch — are narrated and not represented on the stage. 

I have more than once spoken of Shakespeare's self-restraint as 
a most marvellous thing, considering the sort of self that he had 
to restrain. In all cases where he is alleged to have been hurried 
beyond his own control into bewildered excitement, the ground of 
the allegation lies in the critic's inability to rise to the heights of 
tragic emotion : the poet's imagination is sure and unfaltering at 
the most dizzy elevations, though the critic, hampered, probably 
robbed of his natural strength and palsied by artificial notions of 
what is becoming, cannot follow him with the same certainty of 
step. Most persons of the same race with Shakespeare should be 
able to feel his firm mastery over the most perturbing passions, if 
only they could give themselves up to the guidance of his imagi- 
nation without constraint. 

A standing count against Shakespeare, among those who looked 
upon him as a wild irregular genius, was the unbecoming intru- 
sion of low comedy into tragic situations. His worst offences in 
this respect were considered to be the Clown in the last Scene of 
" Cleopatra," the Porter in Act ii. Scene 3 of " Macbeth," and 
the Fool in Act iii. Scene 2 of " Lear." An easy and satisfactory 
explanation of the Gravedigger in " Hamlet " might be found in 
the general distemperment of that play ; but those others were 
coarse violations of propriety, to be dismissed simply as examples 
of the gross taste of the age that could tolerate them. Now, 



302 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ! 

doubtless, those passages are too gross for modern ears : and yet, 
we cannot condemn them except when we come upon them with- 
out having entered into the stormy passions in the midst of which 
they occur. The Fool in " Lear" comes in when the poor, infirm, 
weak, and despised old man has been, scene after scene, gradually 
wrought up to almost inarticulate frenzy, and is wandering shel- 
terless amidst unheard-of bursts of thunder, sheets of fire, and 
groans of roaring wind and rain ; to fix one's thoughts continu- 
ously on the maddening situation of the poor old man would be 
insupportable — some relief is imperatively demanded. And a 
very touching relief it is to pass from the monstrous unkind- 
ness of the daughters and the growing madness of the old man 
to the devotedness of the hired boy Fool, following his master 
through such a tempest, and trying to divert him with his pro- 
fessional sallies, as if neither daughters nor elements were unkind. 
Nor is the matter of the Fool's wit so incongruous : laughter is 
a natural outlet for absorbing agitation — poor old Lear is too far 
gone to laugh, his brain is beginning to turn, but he smiles at 
the boy's efforts, and is soothed by them. The case of the Fool in 
" Lear " is thus exceedingly complicated : his presence affects us 
powerfully in many and shifting ways, which cannot be clearly 
stated. The other two cases are very much simpler : in them the 
art of the dramatist is less subtle and more unmistakable. No- 
body capable of being absorbed and fascinated by the horrors of 
the scene in the court of Macbeth's castle can fail to acknowledge 
the gratefulness of the transition to the unconcern and coarse 
humour of the Porter. De Quincey wrote in delighted admira- 
tion of the perfection of dramatic skill that recalls us from the 
demoniac world of the murderers by the knocking at the gate. 
The many-sided significance of that startling knock, the rush of 
reflection that it sets free, makes it indeed an incomparable stroke 
of dramatic genius : but it does not necessarily recall us from the 
murder ; for a moment it aggravates the strain of our suspense ; 
we do not breathe freely till the sleepy, unconcerned, and deliber- 
ate porter appears with his utter relaxation of the preceding tragic 
intensity. The change is complete in several aspects, and we re- 
turn with all the greater force to the evolution of the tragedy after 
this brief interval of free breath. The case of the Clown in " An- 
tony and Cleopatra " is somewhat more subtle and difficult for 
cool reason to comprehend. His stupid lumpish answers about 
the worm are also of the nature of a relief to tragic intensity of 
strain in the audience ; but they are more : like the sayings of the 
Fool in "Lear," they enter into the main current of the play — 
they are a relief to the high-strung excitement of the queen. 
Cleopatra is working herself up to the pitch of self-destruction, 
and the insensate dull stupidity of the Clown comes in oppor- 



CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 303 

timely to keep her from passing out of her resolution into delirious 
hysterics. Neither she nor Charmian could die with calm bravery : 
they keep down their fears of death with forced laughter and 
forced attention to trifles : they trifle with death, and put off the 
fatal moment as long as they can, and you feel that any untoward 
turn might make them shriek with horror and fall down in trem- 
bling impotence to despatch themselves. 

To many minds Isabella's protestation to Angelo and Constance's 
invocation of Death must appear extravagant and unnatural. To 
understand them one must be able to recognise the transfiguring 
force of intense passion ; one must understand the alchemical brain 
that our dramatist ascribes to lunatics, lovers, and poets. Other 
passions than love are a momentary madness, and change whatever 
the eye falls upon into accordance with their imperious needs : and 
whoever has not a living knowledge of this transfiguring power, 
cannot but think it an extravagance to speak of wearing the im- 
pression of keen whips as rubies, or to hail the hideous skeleton 
of death as an object to be embraced and kissed as a longed-for 
husband. There is strict dramatic truth in Macbeth's fancy that 
the blood on his hands would incarnadine the multitudinous seas, 
making the green, one red. The same law of the human mind 
is the justification of litde Arthur's agonised pleadings for his life 
to Hubert in "King John" (iv. i, 100), which might otherwise 
appear to be cold, artificial, and incongruous conceits. The poor 
child's frenzy of terror and eager clinging to life transforms the 
murderer's implements into active advocates for his safety — 

"Arthur. . . . O spare mine eyes, 

Though to no use but still to look on you ! 
Lo, by my troth, the instrument is cold 
And would not harm me. 

Hubert. I can heat it, boy. 

Arih. No, in good sooth : the fire is dead with grief, 
Being create for comfort, to be used 
In undeserved extremes; see else yourself; 
There is no malice in this burning coal; 
The breath of heaven has blown his spirit out 
And strewed repentant ashes on his head. 

Hub. But with my breath I can revive it, boy. 

Arth. An if you do, you will but make it blush 
And glow with shame of your proceedings, Hubert: 
Nay, it perchance will sparkle in your eyes; 
And like a dog that is compelled to fight, 
Snatch at his master that doth tarre him on. 
All things that you should use to do me wrong 
Deny their office : only you do lack 
That mercy which fierce fire and iron extends, 
Creatures of note for mercy-lacking uses. 

Hub. Well, see to live; I will not touch thine eye 
For all the treasure that thine uncle owes : 
Yet am I sworn and I did purpose, boy. 
With this same very iron to burn them out." 



304 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

Finally, let us see what can be said for and against the extrava- 
gant ramps of some of Shakespeare's heroes. There are passages 
in " Julius Caesar " and " Coriolanus " almost as bombastic as any- 
thing to be found in Shakespeare's dramatic predecessors. Caesar's 
bearing in the interview with the conspirators, when they beg the 
repeal of Publius Cimber's banishment, is not less lofty than Tam- 
burlaine's inflation, though more calm and dignified — 

" Know Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause 
Will he be satisfied." 

And the speech beginning — 

" I could be well moved, if I were as you " — 

may not be an offence against the modesty of nature, but taken 
by itself, is an offence against the modesty of art. The boasts and 
brags of Coriolanus out-Herod the Herod of the mysteries. For 
example (i. i, 200) — 

" Would the nobility lay aside their ruth, 
And let me use my swoid, I'd make a quarry 
With thousands of these quarter'd slaves, as high 
As I could pick my lance." 

And (iv. 5, 112) — 

" Let me twine 
Mine arms about that body, where against 
My grained ash an hundred times hath broke 
And scarr'd the moon with splinters." 

It is a noticeable circumstance that these inflated speeches — as 
well as one or two in "Antony and Cleopatra" — are put in the 
mouths of Roman heroes. I am not quite sure that this is not 
one explanation and justification of them : they may have been 
Shakespeare's ideal of what appertained to the Roman character. 
But apart from their being true to the Roman manner, they may 
be justified also on the principle of variety. It must have been 
a relief to Shakespeare's mind, ever hungry for fresh types of 
character, to expatiate in the well-marked high-astounding ideal ; 
and it is equally a relief to the student or spectator who may have 
followed his career and dwelt with appreciative insight on his 
varied representation of humanity. This is the broadest justifi- 
cation : if we consider more curiously, other justifications make 
themselves palpable. The inflation of Coriolanus and Caesar is 
not like Tamburlaine's presented to us as a thing unquestioned 
and admired by those around them, as being, for aught said upon 



HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 305 

the stage to the contrary, the becoming language of heroic man- 
hood. The violent language of Coriolanus is deprecated by his 
friends, and raises a furious antagonism in his enemies. Side 
by side with Csesar's high conception of himself^ we have the 
humorous expression of his greatness by blunt Casca and the 
sneering of cynical Cassius. In the case of Caesar, too, there is a 
profound contrast between his lofty declaration of immovable 
constancy and the immediate dethronement of the god to lifeless 
clay. We must not take the rant of Caesar, Coriolanus, or Antony 
by itself simply as rant, and wish with Ben Jonson that it had 
been blotted out. We must consider whether it does not become 
the Roman character : we must remember that a varied artist like 
Shakespeare may be allowed an occasional rant as a stretch to 
powers weary of the ordinary level; and above all, we must 
observe how it is regarded by other personages in the drama — in 
what light it is presented to the audience. 

IV. — His Delineation of Character. 

One large deduction must always be made from our assertion of 
Shakespeare's truth to nature. All his personages, except intended 
Malaprops, are supposed to have the gift of perfect expression. 
The poet is the common interpreter. Gervinus, indeed, professes 
to find in some cases a correspondence between characters and their 
mode of expression ; but we may rest assured that all such dis- 
coveries are reached by twisting accident into the semblance of 
design. We might as soon try to argue that it was natural for 
Shakespeare's personages to speak in blank verse. It is expected 
of a dramatist that he shall give as perfect expression as he can 
to the emotions and thoughts that occur : the conditions of his 
art impose no limits upon him in this direction except that his 
personages must not illustrate their meaning by allusions flagrantly 
beyond the possibiUties of their knowledge. If the emotions of 
the dramatis personce are in keeping with their characters and 
their situations, and are at the same time theatrically eflective, the 
dramatist has fulfilled the weightier part of dramatic law. 

Shakespeare's personages have all their author's vividness, en- 
ergy, and delicacy of language, and all the abstractness of phrase 
and profusion of imagery characteristic of the Elizabethans. 
Shakespeare could never have been what he is had he been fettered 
bv considerations of exact truth to nature or to history. We are 
not to believe that when he put into Macbeth's mouth the famous 
adjuration of the witches, he paused to consider whether a man 
in such a situation would naturally have so much to say : he took 
a firm grasp of the heroic exultation proper to such a moment. 



306 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

and gave his imagination full swing to body it forth to the 
audience. Nor must we take exception to the abstruse, antithetical, 
and metaphysical statement of the conflict of motives in Macbeth's 
soliloquies, and say that such coherence and figurative force of 
expression would have been impossible in a rude thane so violently 
agitated ; enough that such an internal conflict was natural to a 
man of Macbeth's character — the poet must be left free to express 
the fluctuating passion with all the force of his genius. 

Nor did Shakespeare impede the free movement of his genius 
by vexatious attention to little details of costume and surround- 
ings : he makes Romans toss caps in the air, and wave hats in 
scorn, makes Hector quote Aristotle, makes Mantuan outlaws 
swear by the bare scalp of Robin Hood's fat friar. Yet such was 
the vivid and searching force of his intellect, the quickness of his 
constructive energy, that in a brief effort of intense concentration, 
he was able to realise a scene in its essential circumstances and 
feelings with a propriety that the mere scholar would not have 
attained after years spent in the laborious accumulation of accu- 
rate particulars. He could hardly have seized the leading features 
with such freshness had he stood hesitating and consulting author- 
ities about details : he went in boldly, and his clearness of insight 
kept him right in the main. Hazlitt quotes his picture of Caliban 
as a special example of his truth to nature. Now the realisation 
of Caliban is not faultless. It does not seem to have been observed 
that though Caliban tastes intoxicating liquor for the first time 
from the flask of Stephano, yet, at the end of the play, he ex- 
presses a civilised contempt for a drunkard. Still we should not 
be disposed for a slight inadvertence like this — which doubtless 
might be plausibly argued to be no inadvertence at all, but a stroke 
of profound wisdom — to moderate very much what Hazlitt says, 
that " the character of Caliban not only stands before us with a 
language and manners of its own, but the scenery and situation of 
the enchanted island he inhabits, the traditions of the place, its 
strange noises, its hidden recesses, his frequent haunts and ancient 
neighbourhood, are given with a miraculous truth of nature, and 
with all the familiarity of an old recollection." This is very far 
from being literally true ; yet when we compare Shakespeare's 
characters with what other dramatists have accomplished, we must 
admit that some such superhuman exaggeration is needed to give 
the ordinary reader a just idea of his marvellous pre-eminence. 

Shakespeare's historical plays afford the most unambiguous 
and indisputable evidence of his close study of character, and 
his inexhaustible fertility in giving it expression. He could 
not merely sum up a character in such general language as he 
puts into the mouth of the Duchess of York concerning her son 
Richard : — 



HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 30^ 

"Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy; 
Thy school-days frightful, desperate, wild, and furious, 
Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous, 
Thy age confirmed, proud, subtle, bloody, treacherous." 

But he had a hving and manageable knowledge of the subjective 
moods and objective manifestations of the character thus summed 
up ; he could imagine the feelings, actions, and artifices of such a 
man under a great variety of circumstances. Many people have 
knowledge of character enough to draw the general outlines of 
Richard, but who has shown sufficient knowledge of character to 
embody such a conception ? This power is shown in all his plays, 
but is most conspicuous and easily recognised in his historical 
plays, because there he had more definite materials for his imagi- 
nation to lay hold of and work into consistent characterisations. 
What chiefly makes his characters so life-like is their many-sided- 
ness. The poet's just sense of clear broad dramatic effect is shown 
in making his leading characters approach to well-marked types ; 
but the various characters are much more than narrow abstractions 
— each has traits that individualise him, and strongly colour his 
behaviour. Take his soldiers, his mighty men of war, the bastard 
Faulconbridge in " King John," Hotspur in " Henry IV.," Coriola- 
nus, and Antony. All have a powerful theatrical effect as men of 
heroic strength and courage, but each is a distinct character : the 
Bastard is individualised by his robust hearty humour and unpre- 
tentious loyalty ; Hotspur, by his wasp-stung impatience, absorbed 
manner, and irresistible ebullience of animal spirits ; Coriolanus, 
by his patrician pride ; Antony, by his oratorical skill, his fondness 
for the theatre, and his sensuaUty. The various qualities of each 
are consistent with their warlike reputation, and studiously con- 
sistent with one another. So his kings, John, Richard 11., Henry 
IV., Henry V., Henry VI., Henry VIII., all have a certain kingly 
dignity, and yet they are distinct individuals : the weak kings, 
Richard, John, and Henry VI., are weak in different and character- 
istic ways — Richard from impulsive generosity, John from moral 
obliquity, Henry from constitutional imbecility. Look again at 
the extraordinary circle of sorrowing women round Richard III., 
how skilfully they are distinguished : the she-wolf Margaret, the 
motherly old Duchess, the weak and yielding Anne, the high- 
spirited and clever Elizabeth, bear their sorrows in widely different 
attitudes. Or we might make a small gallery of portraits of high 
ecclesiastics — the worldly smooth papal legate Pandulph in " King 
John," the fiery unscrupulous Beaufort in " Henry VI.," the 
ambitious noble-minded Wolsey, the meek but firm Cranmer — all 
exhibited with unmistakable individuality. 

Of his historical plays, the First " Henry IV." is one of the 
finest in study of character. The classical histories also abound in 



308 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

fine discrimination. " Troilus and Cressida" is strongly coloured 
by the mediseval prejudice in favour of the Trojans, which has led 
the dramatist to present the fighting heroes of the Greeks as stupid 
blocks, mere draught-oxen yoked by superior intellect to plough 
up the wars ; but the various conceptions are worked out with 
very skilful touches. "Juhus Caesar" also contains very clearly 
marked delineations, — Brutus, Cassius, Casca, Antony, Portia : 
the dramatist worked from translated authorities, but no one has 
ventured to dispute the essentials of his interpretations. None of 
the Roman plays, however, contain finer characterisation than the 
two parts of " Henry IV.," which between them exhibit the 
characters of the King himself, the Prince, Hotspur, (jlendower. 
Lady Percy, Falstaff and his companions. The great magician, 
Glendower, is drawn with remarkable delicacy ; his indulgence 
towards the whims of Hotspur is a very happy stroke, in fine 
keeping with the qualities found in union with his deep knowledge 
and lofty pretensions (" i Henry IV.," iii. i) : — 

" In faith he is a worthy gentleman, 
Exceedingly well read, and profited 
In strange concealments, valiant as a lion 
And wondrous affable, and as bountiful 
As mines of India." 

There are a good many points of resemblance between Prince 
Henry and Hamlet, although they seem to stand contrasted as 
examples of princely gaiety and princely melancholy. Harry 
might pass for Ophelia's picture of Hamlet before his noble 
mind was overthrown : he has " the courtier's, soldier's, schol- 
ar's eye, tongue, sword." True, these qualities in Harry are 
smothered up from the world when first he is introduced to 
us ; but when he has mounted the throne his friends reckon 
up his virtues and argue that he must have used wildness as a 
veil to contemplation. They say (" Henry V.," i. i, ;^8) : — 

" Hear him but reason in divinity, 
And all-admiring with an inward wish 
You would desire the king were made a prelate; 
Hear him debate of commonwealth affairs 
You'ld say it hath been all in all his study; 
List his discourse of war, and you shall hear 
A fearful battle rendered you in music; 
Turn him to any course of policy 
The Gordian knot of it he will unloose 
Familiar as his garter : that, when he speaks, 
The air, a chartered libertine, is still, 
And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears 
To steal his sweet and honeyed sentences." 



HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 3O9 

Further, as Harry is opposed to impatient and warlike Hotspur, 
and is anxious to try skill in arms with him, so Hamlet is opposed 
to Laertes. And the resemblance goes deeper. Harry is emi- 
nently a conscientious man : he assumes the crown with a deep 
sense of his responsibihties, and will not undertake the war with 
France and involve the two nations in bloodshed until he is fully 
assured by his counsellors of the perfect justice of his cause 
("Henry V.," i. 2, 10-30). In like manner Hamlet abstains 
from the bloody business of revenge till he obtains unequivocal 
proofs of his uncle's guilt and utter badness of heart. Nor is 
Harry's companionship with Falstaff inconsistent with Hamlet's 
character. The prince goes with that wild set for the purpose of 
studying them and seeing life {"2 Henry IV.," iv. 4, 68), as Ham- 
let frequented the players. And he is not without gloomy fits : he 
is not always in the vein for doffing the world aside and bidding it 
pass. His father's description of him would apply exactly to 
Hamlet : — 

" For he is gracious, if he be observed; 
He hath a tear for pity and a hand 
Open as day for melting charity : 
Yet notwithstanding, being incensed, he's flint, 
As humorous as winter and as sudden 
As flaws congealed in the spring of day, 
His temper, therefore, must be well observed 
Chide him for faults, and do it reverently, 
When you perceive his blood inclined to mirth; 
But being moody, give him line and scope." 

Such a prince might very easily fall into melancholy, if an uncle 
married his mother within two months of his father's death and 
" popped in between the election and his hopes." 

Hamlet, however, is younger than the companion of Falstaff. 
There is no ground whatsoever for the prevailing notion that 
Hamlet's age must be set down as thirty. It proceeds upon 
two quite unfounded assumptions : that the married life of the 
player King and Queen corresponds exactly in its duration of 
thirty years to the married life of Hamlet's father and mother, 
and that the Gravedigger is our only explicit authority. Sev- 
eral circumstances show that Hamlet's age is at the utmost 
seventeen or eighteen. He has just returned from the University 
of Wittenberg, and wishes to go back ; the boy that played the 
woman's part when he was there is not yet too old for the office ; 
his friend Horatio is still there, Laertes is just setting out on 
his travels. The usual age for youths at that stage of their educa- 
tion in Shakespeare's England was between sixteen and eigh- 
teen. And if our philosophical German friends should insist that 
Shakespeare had his own idea of the proper age for leaving the 
University, and that that age was thirty, what are we to make of 



3IO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 

the passage where Polonius and Laertes warn Opheha against 
entertaining the youth's professions of love, alleging among other 
things, that his love is but " a violet in the youth of primy nature," 
and will change when he grows older? Laertes actually speaks of 
him as not yet full grown (i. 3, 11) — 

" For nature, crescent, does not grow alone 
In thews and bulk, but as this temple waxes, 
The inward service of the mind and soul 
Grows wide withal. Perhaps he loves you now," &c. 

The chief difficulty in the play of Hamlet is the prince's delay 
in the execution of his revenge. When his father's ghost makes 
the first revelation of foul play, he cries — 

" Haste me to know't, that I with wings as swift 
As meditation or the thoughts of love 
May sweep to my revenge." 

Yet when he is told that the murderer is his uncle, he is so amazed 
and staggered that he does not at once proceed to execute ven- 
geance, but adds delay to delay, and at last kills the murderer 
upon an unpremeditated impulse. Goethe's well-known theory 
is that this delay proceeds from irresolution and weakness. The 
key to Hamlet's character is found in the words — 

"The time is out of joint: O cursed spite 
That ever I was born to set it right." 

Hamlet is a soft, calm-tempered, cultivated ^prince : he has not 
the strength of nerve to be a hero. '' Shakespeare meant in the 
present case to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a 
soul unfit for the performance of it." Now to ascribe Hamlet's 
delay to weakness of character, and not to the overwhelming 
shock of the ghost's monstrous revelations, is to miss the just 
effect of the tragedy. This I take to be compassion for the strug- 
gles of a noble youth, confronted as he steps across the threshold 
of life in all the generous ardour and sweetness of " primy nature " 
by the discovery of an unnatural crime, perpetrated by those whom 
he most loves and trusts ; confounded, distempered, unhinged, 
jangled by this horrible discovery ; summoned to revenge, but re- 
luctant to believe facts so foul ; distrustful, his faith in humankind 
blasted, seeking bitterly for a revenge that shall be adequate, and 
guided to it at last by the " Divinity that shapes our ends when 
our deep plots do pall." 

Goethe tried to form an idea of what Hamlet might have been 
had his father's life been prolonged. Now the value of this as 
a critical method will appear if we apply it to the life of Prince 
Henry. But at any rate, we are bound to take into account what 



HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 3 1 I 

happened when Hamlet's father's Hfe was cut short ; we cannot 
be allowed to substitute our own conception of what a young 
prince delicately reared ought to be, for the real Hamlet as re- 
vealed by the play. What evidence, then, is there for saying that 
Hamlet was weak, irresolute, cowardly? When he hears that his 
father's spirit is in arms he resolves to watch for it : he crosses its 
path and addresses it at the risk of being blasted : not setting his 
life at a pin's fee, he disregards the warnings of his companions, 
throws them off when they seek to restrain him, and puts himself 
in the power of the dread figure without knowing whether it comes 
from heaven or from hell. When the monstrous revelation is 
made, his heart and strength threaten to fail him : he cries : — 

"Hold, hold, my heart; 
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old. 
But bear me stiffly up." 

And we are asked to believe that this was the effect of fear : the 
man who has just displayed superhuman daring and reckless in- 
difference to life, and who afterwards leads the way in boarding 
a pirate, quakes at the prospect of putting his life in danger ! 
Nothing but theory-blunderers could fail to see the real meaning 
of Hamlet's agitation : he is for a moment astounded and stag- 
gered at the monstrosity of the crime. But why does he not 
recover himself, rush off, and despatch his uncle at once, or at 
least rouse the people as Laertes afterwards did when his father 
was killed, and besiege the palace? Was not this consideration 
paralysing action? Most undoubtedly, consideration here inter- 
posed between impulse and action ; but we do not call that weak- 
ness, irresolution, or cowardice. We call it a proof of strength 
to refrain from rushing intemperately into action. Mark the con- 
trast between Hamlet and Laertes : it is the same contrast that 
Shakespeare draws between Henry and Hotspur. Laertes im- 
petuously raises the people, and threatens to punish — the wrong 
man : he is, like Hotspur, a " wasp-stung and impatient fool." 
And that is what we should have called Hamlet if he had run 
upon the instant at the bidding of the ghost, and thrust his sword 
into his uncle : and if he had gone to the people shouting what 
his father's ghost had revealed, they would very properly have 
thought him mad or cunningly ambitious. But Hamlet, like 
Henry, is a man of larger intelligence looking before and after : 
he is no more a coward than Henry was when he summoned his 
counsellors before rushing into war ; but he desires to be assured 
of the justice of his cause. He at once resolves upon a plan : he 
will put an antic disposition on, and watch for confirmation. But 
is not his outcry against the cursed spite of fortune a proof that 



312 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 

he was unwilling to undertake the task of revenge ? It proves, at 
least, that he did not like the situation that the spite of fortune 
had thrust upon him. But was it weak, irresolute, or cowardly, 
to be agonished by the thought that his father had been killed 
and his mother strumpeted by his uncle, and under the anguish 
of this thought to express a passing wish that he had never been 
born into a world where such crimes were possible ? 

For some time Hamlet's cloak of madness helps him to discover 
nothing : he only finds spies set upon him to discover the secret 
of his derangement. With characteristic recklessness he does not 
carry the pretence far : he merely goes about in disordered dress, 
and in rapt study, and makes himself disagreeable to the aston- 
ished court by the causticity of his remarks : in fact, he uses the 
pretence of madness as a privilege. The King and Queen sus- 
pect the cause of his melancholy, and employ Rosencranz and 
Guildenstern to sound him ; but at the same time they allow the 
obtrusive wiseacre, old Polonius, who knows all about everything 
and is never wrong, to use means for testing his confident theory 
of the Prince's madness. The employment of Ophelia as a decoy 
increases Hamlet's sense of the foulness of the world, and throws 
him with increased force on his friendship with Horatio ; but he 
can discover nothing. At last chance throws the players in his 
way, and he at once concocts a scheme for turning them to ac- 
count. In the meantime, however, the emotion shown by one of 
the actors in reciting a passionate speech makes him accuse him- 
self of cowardice in thus delaying the execution of the Ghost's 
commands ; and if Goethe had been present at his deliberations, 
he would have seconded the young Prince's morbid self-accusings. 
But reason prevails : he reflects justly that the Ghost may have 
been sent by the devil to tempt him to damnation, and resolves 
to have proof of his uncle's guilt more relative than the word of 
an ambiguous apparition. 

But why does Hamlet still delay when he has received strong 
confirmation from the play? He gets an opportunity : becomes 
upon his uncle kneeling in prayer : why does he withhold ? Not 
from fear : not from irresolution : but from cold iron determina- 
tion sure of its victim and resolved not to strike till the most 
favourable moment. He is tempted to the weakness of yielding 
to impulse ; but he holds back with inflexible strength. His 
words are instinct with the most iron energy of will (iii. 3, 73). 
In the interview with his mother, hearing somebody stir behind 
the arras, he either conceives that now he has caught the villain 
in an unsanctified moment, or he cannot resist the excitement of 
the unexpected opportunity : he makes a pass through the arras, 
and kills Polonius. When he is harrowing his mother's soul with 
reproaches, the Ghost reappears avowedly to whet his almost 



HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 313 

blunted purpose, but with the effect of diverting the rising frenzy 
of his invective : the departed spirit retains its tenderness for the 
weak woman, and is pained to see her thus tormented by exposure 
and remorse. And Hamlet still bides his time. Was this cow- 
ardice? In his sharp self- questionings, he calls it so himself. On 
his way to England another incident occurs that makes him reflect 
on his own conduct, and he says : — 

" Now whether it be 
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple 
Of thinking too precisely on the event, 
A thought which quartered, hath but one part wisdom 
And ever three parts coward, / do not know 
Why yet I live to say ' This thing's to do ; ' 
Sith I have cause afid zvill and strength and means 
To do V." 

His delay was inexplicable to Hamlet himself, though we are all 
so confident in explaining it for him. One might have pointed 
out to him, without seconding his own morbid and unjustifiable 
accusation of cowardice, that he had still no means of satisfying 
the people that he was a pious avenger and not merely a mad or 
an ambitious murderer, more particularly after he had incurred the 
accidental taint of the murder of Polonius, whom he was not to 
know that the King would inter in hugger-mugger. And the de- 
sire to be above suspicion, to have an unblemished reputation, was 
a strong motive with Hamlet, as we see from his dying injunction 
to Horatio to tell his story to the world and clear his wounded 
name from unjust aspersion. But I do not think that it was the 
dramatist's intention to represent this as the chief motive for 
Hamlet's delay, otherwise he would have brought it out more 
strongly. No ; the above passage, taken in conjunction with 
Hamlet's communications to Horatio in the beginning of the last 
Scene, supplies the real clue to the dramatist's intention in the 
concluding Acts. Hamlet does not know why he delays : he is 
not afraid — there is not the slightest trace of such a motive in his 
behaviour from first to last — but he restrains himself in a blind 
inexplicable vague trust that some supremely favourable moment 
will occur. Meantime Destiny is ripening the harvest for him : a 
Divinity is shaping his ends : his indiscretions serve him when his 
deep plots do pall. The measure of his uncle's guilt, already full, 
is now heaped over ; crime begets crime ; Hamlet returns from Eng- 
land with documentary evidence of the villain's designs upon his 
own life. He has no time to lose : the news will soon be brought 
from England of the result of his stratagem : he resolves to make 
swift use of the interim. But the supreme moment comes after 
all without his contrivance, and is more comprehensive in its pro- 
visions for justice than any scheme that could have been devised 



314 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

by single wisdom, and executed by single power. Claudius is at 
last caught by vengeance in an act that has no relish of salvation 
in it, is surprised in an infamous plot, and sent to hell with a 
heavier load of guilt upon his back : and others brought within 
the widening vortex of the original crime, are involved in the final 
ruin. Horatio is left to sum up the story : — 

" Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, 
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, 
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, 
And in this upshot purposes mistook 
Fallen on the inventors' heads." 

Volumes might be written, and indeed have been written, on 
Shakespeare's characters. Their sayings and doings are not an 
exact transcript of life ; but they produce the dramatic illusion of 
life more perfectly than if they were actual copies. The varied 
concerns of life do not divert and distract his personages in exactly 
the same way as in the course of an actual ruling passion ; and 
yet the diversion of circumstances in real life is represented in his 
plays and gives his personages the appearance of actual beings. 
Although Hamlet vows to wipe everything from his memory save 
the Ghost's commandment. Nature is too strong for him : he is 
interested in the news from Wittenberg, he cannot resist the old 
desire to see his play acted in a becoming and workmanlike man- 
ner, and even when the crisis is at hand, he is sufficiently disen- 
gaged to bandy words with the Gravedigger and with Osric. Such 
is life, a mixture of great concerns and small : a man possessed 
witli one great unintermitted object is a madman ; and plays that 
represent the reciprocal action and reaction of such characters, are 
not a representation of life. 

The greatest of Shakespeare's comic characters is Falstaff, and 
he also, curiously enough, has suffered somewhat at the hands of a 
friendly German commentator. Gervinus alleges " sensual pleasure 
and brutishness as the starting-point and aim of Falstaff's whole 
being." Now this is taking too serious and unsympathetic a view 
of " that huge bombard of sack, that grey iniquity, that father 
ruffian, that vanity in years ; " and if the ghost of Sir John could 
address a word to this defamer, he would doubtless ask — " I would 
your commentatorship would take me with you ; whom means 
your commentatorship?" There is not a little in common be- 
tween Falstaff and Autolycus. Their moral (or rather immoral) 
principles are the same, and they have the same witty resourceful- 
ness. Both have come down in the world from being pages to 
being "squires of the night's body," "Diana's foresters, gentle- 
men of the shade, minions of the moon." If the fat knight had 
had " but a belly of any indifferency," he says^ " he would simply 



HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 315 

have been the most active fellow in Europe : " and in that case, 
had he only not lost his voice by halloing and singing of anthems, 
the resemblance between him and Autolycus would have been 
tolerably complete. The starting-point and aim of Sir John as 
a subject to invent laughter and an object for laughter to be 
invented on, is his fat unabashed self-satisfaction, and good-hu- 
moured volubility in the conscious absence of nearly all the virtues. 
He is an absolute negation of the cardinal virtues of temperance 
and piety, and of the hardly less important virtues of honesty, 
veracity, active courage, and chastity : but when any breach of 
these virtues is brought home to him, when he is caught telling 
incomprehensible lies or abusing his friends behind their back or 
" misusing the king's press most damnably," he is not ashamed, 
but is ever ready with some quick-witted excuse. Virtue con- 
tends with the fat rogue and is worsted : he is impervious to the 
arrows of remorse : no amount of plain tales can put him down, 
disturb the serenity of his chuckle, or abate his hunger and thirst 
for sugar and sack. It is this complete rout of Virtue by the old 
rascal that is so ludicrous. If his delinquencies were more seri- 
ous than they are, if he were a man scattering firebrands, arrows, 
and death, our moral sentiments would be too much outraged to 
laugh over his victory. But he is comparatively harmless : he is 
too fat " with drinking of old sack and unbuttoning after supper, 
and sleeping on benches after noon," to be a dangerous character : 
and we cannot help extending a laughing sympathy to his presence 
of mind, readiness of wit, volubihty of tongue, and good-hu- 
moured surrender of his person to be the occasion of wit in others. 
Gervinus, if I mistake not, accuses him of wanting courage. This 
depends upon what meaning is attached to courage. Sir John, as 
we know him, is not much of a fighting man ; he does not fight 
longer than he sees reason : but he is too self-complacent and self- 
confident to be called a coward. In the Gadshill encounter, he 
heads the attack on the travellers : afterwards he makes a few 
passes before he runs away, while his comrades take to their heels 
at once : and he leads his ragamuffin company where they are 
peppered, although he does despise honour and fall down pretend- 
ing to be dead before the infuriated Douglas. But granting his 
physical courage to be but small, his moral courage is dauntless. 
When the sheriff comes to the door of the tavern with his formid- 
able train. Sir John is not in the least disconcerted, but is eager to 
have the play played out, and he falls asleep behind the arras in 
a situation where a cowardly breaker of the laws would have been 
perspiring with fear. Even the excitement of battle does not un- 
hinge his fat composure : — 

" Prince. ..... I prithee, lend me thy sword. 

Fal. O Hal, I prithee, give me leave to breathe awhile. Turk Gregory 



3l6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

never did such deeds in arms as I have done this day. I have paid Percy, 
I have made him sure. 

Prince. He is, indeed ; and living to kill thee. I prithee lend me thy 
sword. 

Fal. Nay, before God, Hal, if Percy be alive, thou get'st not my sword; 
but take my pistol, if thou wilt. 

Prince. Give it me : what, is it in this case? 

Fal. Ay, Hal; 'tis hot, 'tis hot; there's that will sack a city. 

[ The Prince draws it ont, and Jiitds it to be a bottle of sack. ~\ " 

He pursues his intrigues with the " Merry Wives of Windsor " 
with a boldness equally imperturbable : he is not deterred by one 
mishap after another from again running into danger. No : if we 
overlook Sir John's courage, we miss the essence of his humour. 
Sir John is no sneaking sinner : he meets all charges of iniquity 
with a full unabashed eye glistening out of his fat countenance, 
with voluble assertions of his own virtue and loud denunciations 
of the degeneracy of the times. After his flight from Gadshill he 
does not hide his face for shame, but enters the " Boar's Head " 
shouting for sack and exclaiming against cowardice : — 

"You rogue, here's lime in this sack too: there is nothing but roguery 
to be found in villanous man : yet a coward is worse than a cup of sack 
with lime in it. A villanous coward ! Go thy ways, old Jack ; die when thou 
wilt; if manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, 
then am I a shotten herring. There live not three good men unhanged in 
England; and one of them is fat and grows old: God help the while a bad 
world, I say. I would I were a weaver ; I could sing psalms or anything. 
A plague of all cowards, I say still." 

In his exquisite interview with the Lord Chief-Justice, he abuses 
these costermonger times, says he has lost his voice with hallo- 
ing and singing of anthems, wishes to God his name were not so 
terrible to the enemy, and crowns his impudence by asking the 
loan of a thousand pounds. There is a good deal more than " sen- 
sual pleasure and brutishness " in the character of Sir John : it is 
not his sensual pleasure and brutishness that we laugh at, but the 
ingenuity and brazen presence of mind with which he glosses over 
his vices. Humour involves a surprise of mood as wit involves a 
surprise of words : and Falstaff's way of taking things is certainly 
very different from what the ordinary way of the world leads us 
to expect. Sir John, too, is a wit as well as a besotted volup- 
tuary and a willing butt for the wit of others. His ridicule of 
Bardolph's nose is incom.parable. Down in Gloucestershire we 
see him watching Shallow and Slender with observant eye, and 
contemptuously noting their peculiarities with a view to future 
capital. " I will devise matter enough out of this Shallow to 
keep Prince Harry in continual laughter the wearing out of six 
fashions, which is four terms, or two actions, and a' shall laugh 
without intervallums." 



THE INTER-ACTION OF HIS CHARACTERS. 317 

V. — The Inter-action of his Characters. 

A writer may have the power of expressing many varieties of 
passion, may have a profound sense of beauty, a quick sense of 
the ludicrous, and a perfect knowledge of character, and yet fail 
in the dramatist's most essential faculty — the power of represent- 
ing one character in active influence upon another. The dram- 
atist has to deal not with still life or with tranquil exposition : he 
must bring impassioned men and women face to face, and show 
how their words operate upon one another to comfort, to cajole, to 
convince, to soothe, and to inflame. The problem ever before the 
mind of the dramatist is, in mathematical language, to estimate 
the effect of a given expression on a given character in a given 
state of feeling. Then this effect reacts, and the reaction reacts, 
and other influences come in and join in the complicated process 
of action and reaction, so that the ability to hold your shifting 
data unconfused, to solve problem after problem with unerring 
judgment, and to keep all your results within the just limits of 
dramatic effect, is one of the rarest of human gifts. This is dra- 
matic genius. 

Shakespeare's swiftness of intellect, fine emotional discrimina- 
tion, and unfailing self-command, were tasked to the utmost in 
the representation of this reciprocal action. In his three greatest 
triumphs in the exhibition of what Bacon calls " working " a man 
— the instigation of Othello's jealousy by lago (" Othello," iii. 3), 
the puffing up of Ajax's pride by Ulysses (''Troilus and Cressida," 
ii. 3), and the wooing of Anne by Richard III. (" Richard III.," 
i. 2) — the influence can hardly be said to be reciprocal: the 
agent stands with immovable self-possession, only keeping himself 
on the alert to follow up with ah his dexterity the effect produced 
by each stroke. A similar remark may be made concerning the 
half- wilful torture of Juliet by her Nurse (" Romeo and Juliet," 
iii. 2), or the gradual agitation of Posthumus by the lies of the 
villain lachimo (" Cymbeline," ii. 4), or the annoyance and final 
discomfiture of the Chief-Justice by the imperturbable Falstaff 
(" 2 Henry IV.," i. 2). So, too, in the swaying of the passions of 
the " mutable rank-scented " Roman mob in " Coriolanus " and 
"Julius C?esar," there is not much reacdon : the dramadst has 
set himself to represent the fluctuations of an excitable crowd 
under the power of adroit oratory, the orator himself in each 
case persevering steadily in his objects. But Shakespeare did not 
shrink from the infinitely more difficult task of making both 
parties to a dialogue exert a powerful influence on each other. 
Of this there are memorable examples in the opening acts of 
" Macbeth," and in several scenes of "Coriolanus" and "Julius 
Caesar." The quarrel between Bruftus and Cassius (" Julius 



3l8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 

Caesar," iv. 3), and the interview of Coriolanus with his mother, 
his wife, and his son ("Coriolanus," v. 3), are managed with con- 
summate knowledge of the heart, and unerring grasp of imagi- 
nation upon its slightest and most shifting fluctuations. One 
would not venture to say that Shakespeare's power of identifying 
himself with his characters, and wonderful swiftness in passing 
from one personality to another, increased after the time when he 
composed " Richard III.," and delineated the scenes between Mar- 
garet and the objects of her hatred : but certainly he increased in 
the masterly ease of his transitions. The greatest monument of 
his dramatic subtlety is the tragedy of " Antony and Cleopatra." 
With all its noble bursts of passion and occasional splendour of 
description, this play has not perhaps the massive breadth of feel- 
ing and overpowering interest of the four great tragedies, " Mac- 
beth," " Hamlet," " Lear," and " Othello " ; but it is greater even 
than " Macbeth " and " Othello " in the range of its mastery over 
the fluctuations of profound passion : it is the greatest of Shake- 
speare's plays in the dramatist's greatest faculty. The conflict of 
motives in " Hamlet " is an achievement of genius that must al- 
ways be regarded with wonder and reverence ; but, to my mind, 
" Antony and Cleopatra " is the dramatist's masterpiece. One 
may have less interest in the final end of the subtle changes 
wrought in the hero and heroine : but in the pursuit and certain 
grasp of those changes, Shakespeare's dramatic genius appears at 
its supreme height. 

Schlegel quotes with approbation a saying of Lessing's regard- 
ing Shakespeare's exhibition of the gradual progress of passion 
from its first origin. " He gives," says Lessing, " a living picture of 
all the slight and secret artifices by which a feeling steals into our 
souls, of all the imperceptible advantages which it there gains, of 
all the stratagems by which it makes every other passion subser- 
vient to itself, tin it becomes the sole tyrant of our desires and 
our aversions." This incautious hyperbole tends to confuse the 
boundaries between the drama and the novel or epic of manners. 
The remark is more applicable to the novels of George Eliot, or 
to the "Troilus and Cressida" of Chaucer, than to the plays of 
Shakespeare, The slight and stealthy growth of passion is wholly 
unsuited for the stage. In the drama, life is condensed and con- 
centrated ; the pulses of life and the energies of growth are quick- 
ened. Passions spring up with more than tropical rapidity. The 
mutual love of Romeo and Juliet, the misanthropy of Timon, the 
ambidon of Macbeth, Hamlet's thirst for revenge, Lear's fatal 
hatred of Cordelia, Othello's jealousy — are all passions of sudden 
growth. lago's artifices are subtle but swift and instantaneously 
effectual: Othello's pang at his first stab (iii. 3, 35) is not less 
sharp than the heart's wound of young Romeo by the first shaft 



TRANQUILLISING CLOSE OF HIS TRAGEDIES. 319 

from Juliet's eyes. The dramatist is very well aware that the 

first suggestion commonly works more slowly : he makes lago 

say — 

*' Dangerous conceits are, in their natures, poisons, 
Which at the tirst are scarce found to distaste, 
But with a little act upon the blood — 
Burn like the mines of sulphur," 

But his poison must work swiftly ; inflammatory insinuations 
must be accumulated and compressed so as to force the passion 
at once into a blaze : before an hour is over, lago exclaims in 
agony — 

"Not poppy, nor mandragora, 

Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world. 

Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep 

Which thou owedst yesterday." 

Hamlet's action is tempered by subsequent reflections, but his 
desire for revenge attains its utmost vehemence at the first 
supernatural solicitation : he at once passionately vows to wipe 
from his memory every record but the ghost's commandment. 
Macbeth does not proceed instantly to murder Duncan ; but the 
confirmation of part of the promise of the witches immediately 
raises the terrible suggestion — 

" Whose horrid image doth unfix his hair 
And make his seated heart knock at his ribs, 
Against the use of nature." 

The great stages of the growth of passion are indicated in Shake- 
speare's dramas with all the power of his genius, but the develop- 
ment proceeds with fiery vehemence. Slight and stealthy develop- 
ment belongs to the domain of the novelist. 



VI. — The Tranquillising Close of his Tragedies. 

I have already drawn attention (p. 290) to the presence of 
Destiny or Fortune as an impelling or thwarting influence in 
Shakespeare's dramas. In all his tragedies the influence of this 
mighty World-power on the concerns of men is more or less 
suggested. Romeo takes refuge in death from its persecutions : 
" O, here," he cries at the tomb of Juliet — 

" O, here 
Will I set up my everlasting rest. 
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars 
From this world-wearied flesh." 



320 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 

Before the battle of Philippi, when even Cassius begins partly 
to credit things that do presage, Brutus, who in the end prefers 
leaping into the pit to tarrying till he is pushed, is resolute to hold 
out while any hope remains : — 

" Arming himself with patience 
To stay the providence of some high powers 
That govern us below." 

Macbeth at first is disposed to commit himself to the control of 
Chance : — 

" If Chance will have me king, why Chance may crown me, 
Without my stir." 

And his wife sees the hand of Fate in the half-fulfilled pre- 
dictions of the witches and the entrance of Duncan under her 
battlements. The bastard Edmund ridicules the excellent foppery 
of the world in making guilty of our disasters the sun, moon, and 
stars ; but later in the play old Kent can find no other satisfactory 
way of accounting for the cruelty of Goneril and Regan, and the 

kindness of Cordelia : — 

" It is the stars, 
The stars above us, govern our conditions." 

Othello exclaims of the supposed treachery of Desdemona : — 

" 'Tis destiny unshunnable as death." 

And when he calls to mind his prowess in happier days, cries : — 

" O vain boast ! 
Who can control his fate?" 

The magnanimous Antony rises superior to the enmity of Fate : 
when his soldiers are lamenting round him, he says to them : — 

" Nay, good my fellows, do not please sharp Fate 
To grace it with your sorrows : bid that welcome 
Which comes to punish us, and we punish it 
Seeming to bear it lightly." 

The thought of inevitable Destiny, iron Fate, is a great tran- 
quilliser, and rolls over tragic catastrophes like the calm grandeur 
of stars after a storm. When our minds are fatigued by the spec- 
tacle of horrors, or poignant griefs, or violent struggles of fatal 
issue, this thought unfolds itself to soothe the tumult. We sub- 
due the keen agitation of particular calamities by fixing our 
eyes on the calm majesty of the irresistible forces of the universe : 
we take some part of the disturbing culpability of individual 



TRANQUILLISING CLOSE OF HIS TRAGEDIES. 32 1 

agents off their shoulders, and lay it on the Stars, dread agents 
equally above our love and our hatred. Before the awful mag- 
nificence of their doings, our fierce detestation of individual malice 
is subdued, and the sorrows of the individual lose their sharp- 
ness merged in the sorrows of mankind. 

The power that overhangs Shakespeare's tragedies appears also 
in the aspect of an inexorable and relentless Justice, blindly deal- 
ing out the punishment of death to all who are wilfully or accident- 
ally brought within the sweep of her sword. Not the slightest 
culpability is left unavenged. None remain alive at the end 
who have been so intimately mixed up with the chief victims that 
their survival would chafe our sense of justice and vex our medita- 
tions on the impartial rigour of the Destinies. Not one false step 
within the tragic circle can be withdrawn. Conscious or uncon- 
scious, intentional or unintentional, all complicity is fearfully 
punished. We ask what poor Cordelia had done that she should 
perish untimely ; and Justice points to her wayward refusal to 
humour the exacting irritability of her doting old father. Ophelia ? 
She was thrust for a moment by the wretched rash intruding 
Polonius between Hamlet and his revenge : for one moment she 
was the innocent tool of the guilty, and though her sad fate 
was avenged on Hamlet, she could not escape. Consider how you 
should have felt had Cordelia survived Lear or Ophelia survived 
her father, her brother, and her lover, and you will recognise 
the dramatic justice of involving them in the general ruin of 
their friends and enemies. The fate of Desdemona is too har- 
rowing if we miss the completeness of the dramatist's design in 
the outlines of her character. In the first frenzy of our grief 
and anger, our thoughts run fiercely towards revenge. We do 
not regret the death of Emilia, remembering that she had been 
guilty of stealing the fatal handkerchief. We behold with savage 
satisfaction the remorse of Othello, and his desperate retribution 
on himself. We exercise our ingenuity in devising tortures for 
lago, the fiendish contriver of all the mischief. Then when justice 
has been surfeited, and the awful question — Who can control his 
fate ? rolls its starry grandeurs over the fatigued spirit, we revert 
to the hfe of the victim, and in that mood we recognise a sinister 
influence even in the stars of poor Desdemona. She was not a pale 
creature of colourless blood, framed for a long unruffled life. 
Her nature was capable of the intemperate passion that leads 
too surely to tragic consequences. That passionate love of hers 
for the warlike Moor, which seemed so monstrous and unnatural 
to her father, and which was construed so craftily by lago, was 
too immoderate to be innocuous : " such violent delights have 
violent ends." The powers that gave her the heart to slight men 
of her own complexion and degree and fix her affections on a 



322 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 

Moor, had destined her to unhappiness. Remove this vicious 
mole of nature from Desdemona, leave her a cold pattern of 
propriety reserved to her lover and obedient to her parents, anc^ 
you find it much more difficult to quell your uneasiness at the 
crushing of such a flower under the wheel of Destiny. The vicious 
mole is small in proportion to the retribution : but the fact that 
she was in a measure, however faint, accessory to her own ruin, 
blends with other mitigations of the final horror. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES AND 
SUCCESSORS. 

The more we read of Elizabethan literature, the more we be- 
come convinced of the vast superiority of Shakespeare. If one 
begins the study of the Elizabethan dramatists with a stern resolu- 
tion to throw aside all prepossessions, and judge every man as if 
one had heard nothing whatever about him before, the first con- 
clusion reached from dipping here and dipping there into choice 
passages may well be, that they all wrote with very much the same 
kind of power. But when we have lived in their company for some 
time, and studied their works in various lights, we become aware 
of immeasurable differences. Gradually we come to see that each 
man applies a different kind of power to the expression of every 
thought, the conception of every character, the construction of 
every scene ; and the sum of these individualities is enormous. 

But though no other Elizabethan dramatist could make the 
shadow of a claim to be the equal of Shakespeare, there were 
other men among them justly entitled to be called great. Why, 
it is often asked, was there such a cluster of great dramatists in 
that age? Why, we may reply, should there not have been? 
The drama at that time offered a new and exciting field to the 
English imagination ; and the English imagination, finding the 
field congenial, rushed into it, and worked at the exalted pitch of 
energy which new things inspire. Marlowe was really the Colum- 
bus of a new literary world. He emancipated the English mind 
from classical notions of stiff decorum — the necessary accompani- 
ments of the large theatre and the cothurnus and the mask — and 
by so doing, opened up infinite possibilities to the dramatist. 
Now, indeed, the drama could be a representation of passionate 
hfe. Men struggling passionately after antagonistic aims could 
now be brought face to face ; and the ups and downs, the hopes 
and fears, the shrinkings and the darings of the struggle and the 
characters of the combatants, could be placed in swift and dazzling 



324 SHAKESPEARE S CONTEMPORARIES. 

and heart-shaking succession visibly before the eyes of the specta- 
tors. The stage even dared to show how men and women bore 
themselves in the presence of incensed Death — how their spirits 
quailed or remained constant in fierce defiance with the knife at 
their throat. Never was there an emancipation so calculated to 
excite the human intellect to the very utmost of its powers. No 
wonder that the age should have produced the largest cluster of 
great names in our literature. 

Further, I believe it may be said that it is indispensable to the 
production of a very great man that a number of great men should 
work side by side. They not only stimulate one another to ex- 
treme effort, but they also, consciously and unconsciously, get 
from one another invaluable helps and suggestions. In literature, 
in art, in commerce, all through hfe, I believe this rule holds. In 
all things it is an infallible source of degeneration to keep com- 
pany with inferior minds. You cannot even have a good whist- 
player, or billiard-player, or cricketer, without others to spur him 
on ; remove the stimulus of competition, and inevitably he is de- 
moralised. Distinguished criminals do not occur singly. What 
great orator ever rose up from a low general level ? When one 
man makes a tremendous fortune, you are certain to find others 
following hard in his wake. Greatness in the humblest walks as 
well as in the highest is so difficult an achievement, and demands 
such a persistence in heroic effort, that men cannot persevere unto 
the end, but fall away from the straight course unless they are kept 
to it by the most powerful of human motives — the ambition of 
making or keeping a reputation. 

The dramatists of greatest general repute next to Shakespeare 
are Ben Jonson and John Fletcher.^ There are good grounds for 
their pre-eminence. i\mong their contemporaries and competitors 
were men of higher and rarer qualities, men of more interesting 
character ; but no others, excepting always Marlowe and Shake- 
speare, gave so much original impulse to the drama, estabhshed 
themselves so firmly and unmistakably as leaders of literature. 
We shall see that it is a mistake to regard Jonson as an imitator 
of classical models ; and that he himself took a juster view of his 
position when he disclaimed adherence to Plautus and Terence, 
and declared himself the inventor of a new comedy. Jonson was 
the first English dramatist who found the whole materials of his 
comedy in contemporary life. He may have taken this idea 
from the I^atin comedians. But his method as well as his spirit 
was essentially different from theirs. Chapman was an older man 
than Jonson, and Dekker excelled him in the fidelity and delicacy 
of his delineation of life ; but both were his disciples. As regards 

1 I shall show reason for believing that injustice is done to Fletcher by writing 
his name with Beaumont's. 



GEORGE CHAPMAN. 325 

Fletcher, who threw into the drama not only the high spirits and 
daring manner of aristocratic youth, but also a sweet odour of 
poetry brought from the vales of Arcadia and the gardens of the 
Faery Queen, he is the real progenitor of the drama of the 
Restoration. Charles Lamb was not strictly correct in saying 
that "■ quite a new turn of tragic and comic interest came in 
with the Restoration." It was not strictly new : it had at least 
been foreshadowed by Fletcher. Dryden was Fletcher's pupil in 
tragedy as Wycherley was in comedy. Their work was the 
natural development of his when relieved from the restraining 
influences of his age — in tragedy, the competition of men who 
wrote with a high sense of artistic responsibility, and in comedy, 
the regard to decency imposed by a decorous female sovereign and 
her successor, a royal old woman. The young barbarians who en- 
joyed the obscenities of Fletcher would not have been shocked by 
the indecent wit of Wycherley or Congreve, and probably looked 
upon Shakespeare as old-fashioned and stilted. 

I have said nothing about the influence of the Spanish drama on 
Elizabethan dramatists, because I do not believe that it could have 
exercised, or did exercise, any appreciable influence. It may have 
been that Marlowe was induced to write for the public stage by 
hearing of a great popular drama in Spain — news which he might 
have had from his friend Greene if he did not know it otherwise ; 
but once the Elizabethan drama was in full career, it was no more 
possible to turn it into the channels of the Spanish drama, than to 
turn the Rhine at Frankfort into the Rhone, or to sensibly change 
the waters of the Ganges by bucketfuls from the Volga. Much 
of the material of the English drama was taken from Southern 
Europe, where intrigue and passion have freer play than with us ; 
but the mode of representation was wholly indigenous. 



I. — George Chapman (i 559-1634). 

George Chapman is conspicuous among the mob of easy and 
precocious writers in his generation for his late entrance into the 
service of the Muses, and his loudly proclaimed enthusiasm and 
strenuous labours in that service. He made no secret of the effort 
that it cost him to climb Parnassus, or of his fiery resolution to 
reach the top ; he rather exaggerated his struggles and the vehe- 
mence of his ambition. He refrained from pubhcation till he was 
thirty-five years old, and then burst upon the world like a repressed 
and accumulated volcano. The swelling arrogance^ and lofty ex- 

1 A profession of contempt for critics was quite a commonplace in those days ; 
but Chapman is pecuHarly earnest. His fury at some exceptions taken to his 
Homer was boundless: he fairly gnashed his teeth at the frontless detractions of 



326 Shakespeare's contemporaries. 

pectations with which he had restrained his secret labours display 
themselves without reserve in the ' Shadow of Night ' — his first 
contribution to print. The dedication of that poem and the poem 
itself strike the key-note of his literary character. " It is," he 
bursts out, " an exceeding rapture of delight in the deep search of 
knowledge . . . that maketh man manfully endure the extremes 
incident to that Herculean labour : from flints must the Gorgonian 
fount be smitten." . . . '' Men must be shod by Mercury, girt 
with Saturn's adamantine sword, take the shield from Pallas, the 
helm from Pluto, and have the eyes of Graia (as Hesiodus arms 
Perseus against Medusa), before they can cut off the viperous head 
of benumbing ignorance, or subdue their monstrous affections to a 
most beautiful judgment." If Night, "sorrow's dread sovereign," 
will only give his "working soul" skill to declare the griefs that 
he has suffered, she will be able to sing all the tortures of Earth, — 

"And force to tremble in her trumpeting 
Heaven's crystal spheres," 

He adjures Night, the mother of all knowledge, to give force to 
his words : — 

"Then let fierce bolts, well ramm'd with heat and cold, 
In Jove's artillery my words unfold 
To break the labyrinth of every ear, 
And make each frighted soul come forth and hear. 
Let them break hearts, as well as yielding airs, 
That all men's bosoms (pierced with no affairs 
But gain of riches) may be lanced wide, 
And with the threats of virtue terrified. " 

One cannot wonder that this fiery aspirant to fame, so lofty in his 
pretensions, so novel in his strain, drew all men's eyes upon him, 
and found many admirers eager to support his claim to stand 
among the greatest poets. Englishmen have never been deficient 
in the worship of force : and the vehement enthusiasm of George 
Chapman exerted a strong fascination.^ 

Very little is known concerning Chapman prior to 1594, the 
date of the publication of his ' Shadow of Night.' He is believed 
to have been born at Hitchin, and to have studied at Oxford, and 
perhaps also at Cambridge. The probability is that he had ma- 
tured several works before he began to publish, because he issued 
three or four different productions in rapid succession, and then 
remained silent for six or seven years, presumably till he was 
ready for another attack upon the public. He followed up his 

some stupid ignorants that, " no more knowing me than their own beastly ends, 
and I ever (to my knowledge) blest from their sight, whisper behind me, vilifying 
of my translation." 
1 See above, p. 223. 



GEORGE GIIAPMAN. 



Z^7 



'Shadow of Night' in 1595 with a kixurious study in sensuous 
description — ' Ovid's Banquet of Sense ' ; and his " BHnd Beggar 
of Alexandria " was played by the Lord Admiral's men in the 
same year, though not published till 1598. 

The chronology of the instalments of his translation of Homer 
has been greatly obscured by the rash assertions of Warton ; but 
the facts seem to be that he published seven books in Alexan- 
drines in 1598 : the 'Shield of Achilles ' in heroic couplets in the 
same year; and twelve books complete in 1606. "A Humorous 
Day's Mirth," a comedy, was published in 1599, having been 
sundry times acted before. He olTered no other play to the pubhc 
till 1605, when he printed the comedy of "All Fools." There- 
after he seems to have divided his energies between writing come- 
dies and tragedies and translating from the Classics. His 
Comedies, in addition to those already mentioned, were, — " Mon- 
sieur D'Olive," 1606; "The Gentleman Usher," 1606; '"May- 
Day," 1611; "The Widow's Tears," 1612. His Tragedies,— 
"Bussy d'Ambois," 1607; " Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois," 1613 ; 
"The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron," in 
two plays, 1608; "C?esar and Pompey," not published till 1631 ; 
"Alphonsus," 1654; "Revenge for Honour," 1654. As regards 
translations, he was able to boast towards the close of his career 
that he had translated all the works attributed to Homer. He 
published a continuation of Marlowe's '' Hero and Leander " in 
1606. 

The circumstantial richness of description in Chapman's two 
earliest pieces is very remarkable. That was evidendy his first 
study, and he pursued it with untiring enthusiasm till he obtained 
complete mastery. In the ' Shadow of Night ' there are some 
studiously elaborate descriptions, such as the following : — 

"And as, when Chloris paints th' enamelled meads, 
A flock of shepherds to the bagpipe treads 
Rude rural dances with their country loves : 
Some afar off observing their removes — 
Turns and returns, quick footing, sudden stands, 
Reelings aside, odd motions witli their hands, 
Now back, now forwards, now locked arm in arm — 
Not hearing music, think it is a charm, 
That like loose fools at bacchanalian feasts 
Make them seem frantic in their barren jests." 

But ' Ovid's Banquet of Sense ' is his most fervent and indefati- 
gable effort in the way of rich description. As if he had resolved 
to acquire once for all a complete command of sensuous expression, 
he there narrates a happy adventure that procured the gratifica- 
tion of all the senses, and tasks the whole power of his fancy in a 
protracted endeavour to depict the sweet tumult raised in the soul 



328 Shakespeare's contemporaries. 

by their various objects. The argument of the poem is, that 
Ovid having fallen in love with Julia, daughter of Augustus, 
whom he celebrated under the name of Corinna, found means to 
enter the imperial gardens and see Corinna playing on her lute 
and singing, and afterwards entering her bath, which had been 
filled with the richest perfumes. In this adventure all Ovid's 
senses were feasted ; his hearing with her voice and lute, his sense 
of smell with the dispersed odours, his eye with her disrobed 
figure, his mouth with a kiss. He is permitted also to touch her 
side — the gratification of Feeling, which Chapman calls the senses* 
groundwork, the emperor of the senses, whom it is no immodesty 
to serve. ' Ovid's Bancjuet of Sense ' is really a banquet of most 
exquisite poetry — a most determined effort by the indomitable 
poet to eclipse by fervid elaboration all the raptures of previous 
pairs of mythological lovers — Lodge's Glaucus and Scylla, Mar- 
lowe's Hero and Leander, Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Dray- 
ton's Endymion and Phoebe. How elaborately, for example, and 
with what glowing colours, he describes Ovid's feelings when 
Corinna stooped down to kiss him ! — 

" Her moving towards him made Ovid's eye 

Believe the firmament was coming down 
To take him quick to immortality, 

And that the ambrosian kiss set on the crown : 
She spake in kissing, and her breath infused 

Restoring syrup to his taste in swoon; 
And he imagined Hebe's hands had bruised 
A banquet of the gods into his sense, 
Which filled him with this furious influence. 

The motion of the heavens that did beget 

The golden age, and by whose harmony 
Heaven is preserved, in me on work is set. 

All instruments of deepest melody, 
Set sweet in my desire, to my love's liking. 

With this sweet kiss in me their tunes apply, 
As if the best musician's hands were striking : 
This kiss in me hath endless music closed. 
Like Phoebus' lute, on Nisus' towers imposed. 

And as a pebble cast into a spring. 

We see a sort of trembling circles rise, 
One forming other in their issuing, 

Till over all the fount they circulise; 
So this perpetual motion-making-kiss 

Is propagate through all my faculties, 
And makes my breast an endless fount of bliss; 
Of which if gods would drink, their matchless fare 
Would make them much more blessed than they are. 

But as when sounds do hollow bodies beat, 
Air gathered there, compressed and thickened, 



GEORGE CHAPMAN. 329 

The self-same way she came doth make retreat, 

And so affects the sounds re-echoed 
Only in part, because she weaker is 

In that redition than when first she fled. 
So I, alas ! faint echo of this kiss, 
Only reiterate a slender part 
Of that high joy it worketh in my heart." 

This fervid vividness and laboured minuteness of realisation is 
characteristic of all Chapman's descriptions. All his pictures, 
whether of beauty or of grandeur, whether voluptuous or horrible, 
strike us as if they had been executed under a fiery determination 
to make them thorough. In translating Homer, he was rarely 
content to dismiss a simile with the simple handHng of the 
original : he usually conceived the image for himself, and wrestled 
with it vehemently to make it yield up greater plenitude of 
detail. 

What chiefly strikes us when we survey Chapman's career 
through his successive publications, is his steady improvement in 
every vein that he set himself to master. We should naturally 
infer from his late appearance in print, which is altogether with- 
out a parallel in that age, that his intellect was somewhat stiff 
and stubborn, not easily set in motion or put upon a track ; and 
this inference is confirmed by an examination of his beginnings 
and gradual progress in different veins. Sensuous description 
would seem to have been his first ambition, and to this he held 
his intellect by sheer force of ardent enthusiasm till he succeeded 
up to his ideal. In translating Homer, he had reached the 
thirteenth book before he fairly entered into the heart of his 
subject: "when driving through his thirteenth and last books, 
I drew the main depth, and saw the round coming of this silver 
bow of our Phcebus ; the clear scope and contexture of his work ; 
the full and most beautiful figures of his persons." Once warmed 
to his subject and fairly got under way, his motion was rapid 
enough ; bodies that are difficult to move are also difficult to stop. 
He boasted that he drove through the last twelve books in fifteen 
weeks.^ When we look to his comedies and his tragedies, we find 
in like manner poor beginnings and determined improvement. 
" All Fools " is a great advance on the " Blind Beggar of Alex- 
andria," and " May-Day," with all its coarseness, is in many 
respects a more masterly composition than "All Fools." The 
" Revenge for Honour " is incomparably the best of his tragedies. 

One great aim in his comedies is to exhibit the gulling of one 
personage by another. If one were to take Chapman's comedies 

1 It is somewhat curious that want of competent time is one of his excuses for 
making so little of the first twelve books. One often finds very stiff laborious 
men anxious to have credit for rapid composition. 



330 SHAKESPEARE S CONTEMPORARIES. 

as mirrors of the time, one would suppose that the chief recreation 
of the young courtiers of Ehzabeth and James was to find butts 
for their wit and subjects for practical jokes. Chapman was prob- 
ably put on this track by Jonson's " Every Man in his Humour," 
and he hammered at the idea with characteristic pertinacity. 
There is much clever deception — clever, indeed, to extreme im- 
probability — in the " Bhnd Beggar," which was produced before 
Ben Jonson's first play ; but Chapman's first effort in the repre- 
sentation of deliberate gulling appears in his " Humorous Day's 
Mirth," where the old husband Labernel, the old father Foyes, 
and the young pretentious simpleton Bestia (the same character 
as Jonson's 'Stephen'), are notoriously deceived by a pack of 
waggish gallants. The gulling in "All Fools," as the title 
indicates, is universal : ^ every one of the dramatis persotKX is 
more or less victimised. Again, Monsieur D'Olive is gulled by 
two young courtiers ; and the Gentleman Usher, Bassiolo, by the 
two lovers Vincentio and Margaret, who make him their medium 
of communication, and flatter him into the belief that they are a 
pair of foolish bashful lovers, very much indebted to his kindly 
offices for helping them to declare their mutual passion. The 
" Gentleman Usher " is, taken all in all, the best of Chapman's 
comedies ; it contains a certain admixture of serious plot (which 
would have been better if he could have refrained from intro- 
ducing the supernatural), and the gulling of Bassiolo is his mas- 
terpiece in that way. The most riotous and laughable gulling, 
however, occurs in the coarsest of his comedies, " May-Day," 
which contains more spirited dialogue, more piquant characters, 
and more ludicrous incidents, than any of its predecessors. 

Another of his comic aims, persisted in with no less resolution, 
is to exhibit the hypocrisy, inconsistency, and general frailty of 
women. This, indeed, may be said to be one of his aims in all 
his plays : he has not drawn a single fine female character of any 
mark in any play from the " Blind Beggar " to the '' Revenge for 
Honour " : all from ^F^giale to Caropia have some taint upon them. 
Chapman would almost seem to have been like his own Rinaldo 
in " All Fools," who had vowed eternal war against the whole 
sex. And in displaying their frailties, as in other aims that he 
took in hand, he improved very much with practice. The be- 
haviour of Samathis and Elimine in the " Blind Beggar," though 
a sufficiently malicious conception, is too violently improbable to 
have much point as a satire : Irus, who figures as four different 
personages in the play, marries Samathis as Leon, and Elimine 
as Hermes, and afterwards as Hermes, seduces Samathis, and as 
Leon, Elimine. Florila, the fair Puritan, in the " Humorous 

1 It is difficult to see why Mr Hallam speaks of this play as a tragi-comedy. 



GEORGE CHAPMAN. 331 

Day's Mirth," is more of a satire on female weakness. But 
Chapman's greatest achievement in this vein is the "Widow's 
Tears," in which he makes young Tharsaho conquer a youthful 
widow, who had sworn eternal constancy, within a few months of 
her husband's death, and that, too, by representations of the least 
reputable sort ; and, as a secondary plot, elaborates Petronius 
Arbiter's story of the widow of Ephesus,^ who went to starve 
herself to death in her husband's tomb, and was there wooed and 
won by a soldier stationed near on guard of some crucified bodies. 

In his first tragedies. Chapman's main endeavour was to build 
up a majestic dialogue with weighty moral sentences. In the 
dedication of his " Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois " he falls out 
upon certain critics who seem to have found fault with the want 
of probability both in the characters and in the action of his plays. 
"And for the authentical truth," says he in defence, "of either 
person or action, who (worth the respecting) will expect it in a 
poem, whose subject is not truth, but things like truth? Poor 
envious fools they are that cavil at truth's want in these natural 
fictions : material instruction, elegant and sententious excitation 
to virtue, and deflection from her contrary being the soul, limbs, 
and limits of an authentical tragedy." His sententious excitations 
to virtue are powerfully expressed. He would seem to have 
studied to fulfil his early prayer to Night, concentrating explosive 
forces, and firing off each word of his maxims like a cannon-ball. 
But the thunder of this moral artillery is too continuous and 
deafening ; the interchange of elaborate sentences between his 
personages, especially in the two Byron plays, becomes intolerably 
tedious. In his latest tragedies, however. Chapman observes a 
much better proportion of weighty saws. In the " Revenge for 
Honour " the dialogue is much more full of life than in any of his 
previous tragedies. 

Chapman's designs were always ambitious ; but he was guided 
more like a pedant by authoritative models than like a genuine 
artist by a clear judgment and sure instinct of his own. He had, 
undoubtedly, immense power ; but his sail was a great deal 
prouder and fuller than his ship. Both in his comedies and in 
his tragedies he burdened himself with an unavailing effort to 
imitate the Latin and Greek classics : he probably flattered him- 
self in so doing with a feeling of superiority to less learned play- 
wrights ; but he might have been more successful if he had 
imitated the published works of Shakespeare. But ambitious 
and resolute George would have scorned to imitate consciously 
any of his contemporaries : he aspired to stand out among them 
as a heaven-sent genius, in rapt communion with the great empress 

1 Repeated in Jeremy Taylor's ' Holy Dying,' 



332 SHAKESPEARE S CONTEMPORARIES. 

of all secrets. He might, indeed, hold intercourse with the mighty 
minds of old, and submit to their teaching ; he might also take up 
the conceptions of contemporary writers, and show the proper way 
to carry them out ; but imitate — never. How, then, is this recon- 
ciled with what I have just said, that Chapman imitated like a 
pedant? The explanation is, that Chapman, like many other 
men, was self-deluded in his conviction of originality and inspira- 
tion. His originality was of the nature of oddity, eccentricity, 
quaintness — a forcible wrench given to commonplace or bor- 
rowed ideas, characters, images, and turns of expression. He was 
really very much influenced by contemporaries, and commonly for 
good. The influence of Shakespeare, to all appearance, operated 
strongly on the composition of his " Revenge for Honour " ; and 
it is, as I have already said, by far the best of his tragedies. His 
earliest tragedies contain splendid passages of description, and a 
plethora of pithy and noble sentences ; but his '' Revenge for 
Honour " is, in respect of lively dialogue, powerfully drawn char- 
acter, clearly conceived interaction, absorbing plot, and terrible 
catastrophe, entitled to a high place among the works of the best 
tragedians. The chief drawback to Chapman's comedies is the 
universal ignobihty of the characters — the title "All Fools" 
might almost be extended to his comedies generally. And one 
fatal drawback to all his plays is his low conception of female 
character. No plays can have a durable popularity that have 
none of the softer gifts and graces to mingle with their comic 
humours or tragic horrors. 



n. — John Marston (157 ?-i634). 

John Marston is the Skelton or Swift of the Elizabethan period. 
Like them, he wrote in denunciation and derision of what seemed 
to him vicious or weakly sentimental ; and like them, he im- 
patiently carried a passion for directness of speech to the extremes 
of coarseness. He was for no half-veiled exposure of vices. 
" Know," he cried, in the preface to ' The Scourge of Villany,' 
his first furious lash at the age, " I hate to affect too much obscu- 
rity and harshness, because they profit no sense. To note vices so 
that no man can understand them is as fond as the French execu- 
tion in picture." And a contemporary (in the anonymous " Return 
from Parnassus ") confirmed this self-estimate of his purposes : — 

" Tut, what cares he for modest close-couched terms 
Cleanly to gird our looser libertines? 
Give him plain naked words, stript from their shirts, 
That might beseem plain-dealing Aretine ! " 



JOHN MARSTON. 333 

Marston's satires are not elegant, self-complacent exercitations 
in imitation of Horace, such as Hall was so vain of writing ; he 
wrote in a more savage and less affected vein : — 

" Unless the Destin's adamantine band 
Should tie my teeth, I cannot choose but bite." 

One of his mottoes is taken from Juvenal, with whom he had 
more in common than with Horace — Difficile est sati7'a?n non 
scribere — " It is difficult not to write satire." There would be an 
almost Timonic grandeur in the swelling energy of his defiance of 
public opinion were it not for the satirist's half-humorous enjoy- 
ment of his own position. " I dare defend my plainness against 
the verjuice face of the crabbedest Satirist that ever stuttered. 
He that thinks worse of my rhymes than myself, I scorn him, for 
he cannot ; he that thinks better is a fool. ... If thou perusest 
me with an impartial eye, read on ; if otherwise, know I neither 
value thee nor thy censure." Whatever other people are afraid 
to do has a great charm for Marston. He dedicates his " Scourge 
of Villany " to Detraction, and bids her snarl, bark, and bite, — 
for his spirit scorns her spite : — 

" My spirit is not puft up with fat fume 
Of slimy ale, or Bacchus' heating grape; 
My mind disdains the dungy muddy scum 
Of abject thoughts and Envy's raging hate." 

With somewhat less coarse bravery he consigns himself to ever- 
lasting oblivion — '' mighty gulf, insatiate cormorant" — in oppo- 
sition to the usual aspirations for eternal memory : — 

" Let others pray 
For ever their fair poems flourish may; 
But as for me, hungry Oblivion, 
Devour me quick." 

He beseeches the wits to malign him ; nothing could give him 
greater pleasure : — 

" Proface, read on; for your extremest dislikes 
Will add a pinion to my praise's flights. 
Oh ! how I bristle up my plumes of pride ! 
Oh ! how I think my satires dignified ! 
When I once hear some quaint Castillo, 
Some supple-mouthed slave, some lewd Tubrio, 
Some spruce pedant, or some span-new-come fry 
Of Inns-o'-Court, striving to vilify 
My dark reproofs ! Then do but rail at me — 
No greater honour craves my poesy." 

Almost nothing is known concerning Marston's private life. 
He is beheved to be the John Marston who was admitted B.A. at 



334 SHAKESPEARE S CONTEMPORARIES. 

Oxford in 1593, as being the eldest son of an Esquire, his father 
belonging to the city of Coventry. He began his literary career in 
1598, pubHshing in that year "Pygmalion's Image, and certain 
Satires," and "The Scourge of Villany, Three Books of Satires." 
He is supposed to be the Maxton or Mastone, " the new poet," 
mentioned in Henslowe's Diary in 1599 ; and the play there referred 
to is supposed to be his "Malcontent," published in 1604 in 
two editions — one with, and the other without, an Induction by 
Webster. His other plays published were — " Antonio and Mel- 
lida," 1602; "Antonio's Revenge," 1602; "The Dutch Courte- 
san," 1605; " Parasitaster," 1606; " Sophonisba," 1606; "What 
you Will," 1607; "The Insatiate Countess," 1613. He was also 
conjoined with Chapman and Jonson in the composition of " East- 
ward Ho ! " certain passages of which, written by Chapman and 
Marston between them, gave such offence to the Scotch predilec- 
tions of the king that it brought the trio to prison, and very 
nearly to the pillory. Marston and Jonson were less friendly in 
after life, as they had been at enmity before.^ Jonson told Drum- 
mond that he once " beat Marston and took his pistol from him." 
Marston's total abstinence from literature during the last twenty 
years of his life is not explained. 

One of Marston's favourite butts, both in his Satires and in his 
plays, was the puling sentimentality of enamoured sonneteers. 
He goes beyond himself in the invention of mad indignities, 
coarse and subtle, overt and sly, for these forlorn creatures ; paro- 
dies them and scoffs at them ; buffets them, as it were, tweaks 
their noses, stealthily pulls out hairs and puts in pins, kicks them 
out of his presence. 

" Sweet-faced Corinna, deign the riband tie 
Of thy cork-shoe, or else thy slave will die : 
Some puling sonnet tolls his passing bell; 
Some sighing elegy must ring his knell. 
Unless bright sunshine of thy grace revive 
His wambling stomach, certes he will dive 
Into the whirlpool of devouring death, 
And to some mermaid sacrifice his breath." 

I have endeavoured to show that Shakespeare co-operated with 
this derision of forced love-sighs, writing certain of his sonnets in 
ridicule of their windy suspiration. But Shakespeare himself was 
not always above the contempt of the predestined cynic. ' Venus 
and Adonis ' was singled out by Marston as the type of danger- 
ously voluptuous poetry, and unmercifully parodied in his " Pyg- 
malion's Image," the arts of the goddess to win over the cold 

1 Jonson made Marston the subject of a play in 1601 — "The Poetaster." He, 
and not (as D'Israeli states) Dekker, is Crispinus : the parody of Marston's style 
in the Fifth Act is unmistakable. The reconciliation must have been only tem- 
porary. Marston dedicated his " Malcontent " to Jonson in 1604. 



JOHN MARSTON. 335 

youth being coarsely paralleled in mad mockery by the arts of 
Pygmalion to bring his beloved statue to life. The risk in all 
such parodies is that they be taken as serious productions. This 
has been the fate of Shakespeare's sonnet parodies ; and Marston 
either feared or had actually incurred a similar calamity. 

" Curio, know'st my sprite, 
Yet deem'st that in sad seriousness I write 
Such nasty stuff as is Pygmalion? 

O barbarous dropsy noil ! 
Think'st thou that genius that attends my soul, 
And guides my tist to scourge magnificoes, 
Will deign my mind be rank'd in Paphian shows?" 

Marston seems to have had rather a fancy for parodying Shake- 
speare : he more than once has a fling at " A horse, a horse ! my 
kingdom for a horse ! " and in ''The Malcontent" he has several 
hits at passages in Hamlet, including " Illo, ho, ho, ho, art there, 
old Truepenny?" and a parody on Hamlet's reflection, "What a 
piece of work is man ! " But he also paid the great dramatist the 
compliment of imitating from him. In " The Malcontent," the 
conception of the villain Mendozo is indebted in several particulars 
to Richard HI. And the hinge of the plot is borrowed indirectly 
from " Hamlet." A banished Duke of Genoa returns to court in 
the disguise of Malevolo, an ill-conditioned cynic, who deliberately 
uses his reputation for craziness as a license to tell people of their 
vices in very surly terms face to face. This origin of the idea of 
Malevolo might not have occurred to us but for the parodies of 
Hamlet in the play : and it has a certain value as showing Mar- 
ston's notion of the feigned madness of Hamlet. 

Marston's plays are very remarkable and distinctive produc- 
tions. They are written with amazing energy — energy audacious, 
defiant, shameless, yet, when viewed in the totahty of its manifes- 
tations, not unworthy to be called Titanic. They make no pretence 
to dramatic impartiality ; they are written throughout in the spirit 
of his satires ; his puppets walk the stage as embodiments of 
various ramifications of deadly sins and contemptible fopperies, 
side by side with virtuous opposites and indignant commenting 
censors. His characters, indeed, speak and act with vigorous life : 
they are much more forcible and distinct personalities than Chap- 
man's characters. But though Marston brings out his characters 
sharply and clearly, and puts them in lifelike motion, they are too 
manifestly objects of their creator's liking and disliking : some are 
caricatured, some are unduly black, and some unduly stainless. 
From one great fault Marston's personages are exceedingly free : 
they may be overdrawn, and they may be coarse, but they are 
seldom dull — their life is a rough coarse life, but life it is. And 



336 Shakespeare's contemporaries. 

all his serious creations have here and there put into their mouths 
passages of tremendous energy. Charles Lamb has gathered from 
Marston, for his ' Specimens of Enghsh Dramatic Poets/ extracts 
of passionate declamation and powerful description hardly sur- 
passed in all that rich collection. 

As we read Marston's plays, too, the conviction gains ground 
upon us that, after all, he was not the ill-conditioned, snarling, 
and biting cur that he would have us believe himself to be, but 
a fairly honest fellow of very powerful intellect, only rude and 
rugged enough to have a mad delight in the use of coarse paradox 
and strong language. He was not a self-satisfied snarler, girding 
freely at the world, but tender of his own precious personality. 
His plays convince us that there was a touch of sincere modesty 
in his prayer to Oblivion : — 

"Accept my orison, 
My earnest prayers 'which do importune thee 
With gloomy shade of thy still empery 
To veil both me and my rude poesy. 
Far worthier lines, in silence of thy state. 
Do sleep securely, free from love or hate." 

In the Induction to "What you Will," he makes Doricus turn 
round on Philomene, who is railing against the stupidity of the 
public in the vein of the " Scourge of Villany," and call the strain 
rank, odious, and leprous — " as your friend the author . . . seems 
so fair in his own glass . . . that he talks once of squinting critics, 
drunken censure, splay-footed opinion, juiceless husks, I ha' done 
with him, I ha' done with him." And in the body of the same 
play he is hardy enough to make Quadratus fall out upon Kin- 
say der, his own nom de plume in his early satires : — 

" Why, you Don Kinsayder, 
Thou canker-eaten, rusty cur, thou snaffle 
To freer spirits." 

We cannot complain of ill-treatment from a cynic so unmerciful 
to himself, so uncompromising in his gross ebullient humour. We 
are inchned to concede to him that, like his own Feliche, he " hates 
not man, but man's lewd qualities." There are more amiable and 
admirable characters in his plays than in Chapman's. He has 
good characters to set off the bad : the treacherous, unscrupulous 
Mendozo is balanced by the faithful Celso ; the shamelessly frail 
Aurelia by the constant Maria ; the cruel, boastful Piero by the 
noble Andrugio ; the impulsive, unceremonious, warm-hearted, 
pert, forward, inquisitive, chattering Rossahne, by the true and 
gentle Mellida. 



BEN jONSON. 33;^ 

III. — Ben Jonson (15 73-1 637). 

Ben Jonson had a mind of immense force and pertinacious 
grasp ; but nothing could be wider of the truth than the notion 
maintained with such ferocity by Gifford, that he was the father 
of regular comedy, the pioneer of severe and correct taste. Jon- 
son's domineering scholarship must not be taken for more than it 
was worth : it was a large and gratifying possession in itself, but 
he would probably have written better plays and more poetry 
without it. It is a sad application of the mathematical method 
to the history of our literature to argue that the most learned 
playwright of his time superseded the rude efforts of such un- 
taught mother-wits as Shakespeare with compositions based on 
classical models. What Jonson really did was to work out his 
own ideas of comedy and tragedy, and he expressly claimed the 
right to do so. The most scrupulous adherence to the unity of 
time, and the most rigid exclusion of tragic elements from comedy, 
do not make a play classical. Ben Jonson conformed to these 
externals ; but there was not a more violently unclassical spirit 
than his among all the writers for the stage in that generation.^ 
His laborious accumulation of learned details, his fantastic extrav- 
agance of comic and satirical imagination, the heavy force of his 
expression, his study of " humours," had their origin in his own 
nature, and not in the models of Greece and Rome. 

Jonson, according to his own account, was of Scotch extraction, 
his grandfather being a Johnstone of Annandale, who settled in 
Carlisle, and was taken into the service of Henry VIII. His 
father, who suffered persecution under Mary, and afterwards be- 
came "a grave minister of the gospel," died before our poet's 
birth. Whether or not his motner married a bricklayer as her 
second husband, it would seem that in his youth he was appren- 
ticed to that trade, but not before he had received at least the 
rudiments of a good education at Westminster School under Cam- 
den, a patron to whom he was never backward in acknowledging 
his obligations. From bricklaying he went in disgust to soldiering, 
and served a brief campaign in the Low Countries, distinguishing 
himself in a single combat with a champion of the enemy, whom 
he killed and stripped in the sight of both camps. How he began 
his connection with the stage is not known. He is called " brick- 
layer"^ in 1598 in a letter of Henslowe's giving an account of a 

1 His picture of the Court of Augustus, which Lamb praises so highly, was 
founded probably on what he saw or what he desiderated at the Court of England. 
Jonson seems always to have had friends among the courtiers. 

2 Collier's ' Memoirs of Edward Alleyn," p. 50. It would not have been at all 
unlike the man to work as a bricklayer while writing for the stage. He might have 
enjoyed the defiance of public opinion in honest labour. This would give a liter- 
ality to Dekker's taunt of " the lime-and-mortar poet." But Jonson is entered as 
"player" in 1596. He can hardly be supposed to have returned to bricklaying. 



338 Shakespeare's contemporaries. 

duel that he fought in that year with a player ; but before that 
time he had begun to write plays. A version of his " Every Man 
in his Humour " would seem to have been put on the stage in 
1596, and the play was pubhshed in 1598. The dates of the pro- 
duction of his subsequent plays, as given by Gifford, are as fol- 
lows : "The Case is Altered," pubhshed 1598 ; " Every Man out 
of his Humour," 1599; "Cynthia's Revels," 1600; "Poetaster," 
1601 ; "Sejanus," 1603; "Eastward Ho!" (written in conjunc- 
tion with Chapman and Marston), 1605 ; " Volpone, or The Fox," 
1605; " Epicoene, or The Silent Woman," 1609; "The Alche- 
mist," 1 6 10; "Catiline," 161 1 ; " Bartholomew Fair," 16 14; "The 
Devil is an Ass," 1616 ; " The Staple of News," 1625 ; "The New 
Inn," 1630 ; " The Magnetic Lady," 1632 ; " The Tale of a Tub," 
1633. These plays were not the author's chief means of living: 
they were not as a rule popular. He told Drummond in 16 18 
that all his plays together had not brought him ^200. A more 
lucrative employment was the preparation of Masques for the 
Court : he seems to have furnished the Court with a masque or 
other entertainment almost every year from the accession of James 
till 1627, when his quarrel with Inigo Jones lost him this pleasant 
source of income. In 16 13 he went abroad in charge of the 
eldest son of Sir Walter Raleigh. In 1616 he obtained from the 
Crown a pension of 100 marks. This was confirmed to him by 
Charles ; yet from his loss of the Court entertainments, and the 
failure of the last plays that he wrote, his closing years were em- 
bittered by distressful poverty. In his celebrated conversations 
with Drummond during his visit to Scotland in 1618-19, he com- 
plained that poetry had " beggared him when he might have been 
a rich lawyer, physician, or merchant ; " and his circumstances at 
that time were affluent compared with what they were in his later 
years. 

Jonson's person was not built on the classical type of graceful 
or dignified symmetry : he had the large and rugged dimensions of 
a strong Borderland reiver, swollen by a sedentary life into huge 
corpulence. Although in his later days he jested at his own 
" mountain belly and his rocky face," he probably bore his un- 
wieldy figure with a more athletic carriage than his namesake the 
lexicographer. Bodily as well as mentally he belonged to the 
race of Anak. His position among his contemporaries was very 
much what Samuel Johnson's might have been had he been con- 
tradicted and fought against by independent rivals, jealous and 
resentful of his dictatorial manner. Ben Jonson's large and iras- 
cible personality could not have failed to command respect ; but 
his rivals had too much respect for themselves to give way abso- 
lutely to his authority. They refused to be as grasshoppers in his 
sight. We should do wrong, however, to suppose that this dis- 



BEN JONSON. 339 

turbed the giant's peace of mind. Gifford, wlio makes a good 
many mistakes in the course of his rabidly one-sided memoir of 
Jonson, is certainly right in saying that he was not an envious man. 
His arrogance was the arrogance of irascible and magnanimous 
strength — good-natured when not thwarted, and placable when 
well opposed. If his rivals refused to be as grasshoppers, he 
accepted them contentedly at their own valuation, with, perhaps, 
passing fits of occasional ill-temper. There is no evidence to sup- 
port his alleged jealousy of Shakespeare : it is quite possible that 
he may have made occasional sharp remarks about his great con- 
temporary ; but when he sat down to remember the worth of the 
mighty dead, his words breathed nothing but sincere and generous 
admiration and warm friendship. His relations with Marston and 
Inigo Jones are typical of the man. He quarrelled with them and 
showed them up, was reconciled, and quarrelled again. He took 
offence at Marston, and ridiculed him unmercifully as Crispinus 
"The Poetaster"; became friends with him again; received the 
dedication of his " Malcontent " ; and wrote with him and Chap- 
man in " Eastward Ho ! " yet told Drummond that he had many 
quarrels with Marston. He scoffed at Inigo Jones in "■ Bartholo- 
mew Fair " as Lanthorn Leatherhead, a puppet-seller and contriver 
of masques ; ^ co-operated with him afterwards in the preparation 
of Court entertainments ; and -finally broke with him utterly, and 
tried to extinguish him with lofty contempt. There seems to be 
no denying that Ben was irascible and difficult to get on with. Yet 
there was a fundamental large-hearted good-humour in him too. 
We must not judge of him altogether by his conversations with 
Drummond, as Drummond himself did : he was the sort of man 
that fiills into fits of incontinent railing and depreciation, and so 
conveys an erroneous impression of his normal inner nature. In 
his better moods he was not unwilling to laugh at his own faihngs. 
He had many friends among the great patrons of poetry. 

When we examine into the alleged correctness of Jonson's plays, 
we find curious evidence of how his known acquaintance with the 
classics has imposed upon his critics. " Generally speaking," says 
Gifford, " his characters have but one predominating quality : his 
merit (whatever it be) consists in the felicity with which he com- 
bines a certain number of such personages, distinct from one 
another, into a well-ordered and regular plot, dexterously preser\-- 
ing the unities of time and place, and exhibiting all the probabili- 
ties which the most rigid admirer of the ancient models could 
possibly demand." The regularity of the plot and the observation 

1 Gifford denied this without authority. It is supported by the Drummond con- 
versations, in which Jonson said (in 1618) that he had told Prince Charles that 
" when he wanted words to set forth a knave, he would name him an Inigo ; " and 
also by the language of his final " Expostulation with Inigo Jones." 



340 SHAKESPEARE S CONTEMPORARIES. 

of the probabilities are parts of Gifford's preconceived ideal, formed 
without the slightest attention to the facts. As regards regularity, 
Jonson is so far regular that in most of his plays four acts are 
occupied in exhibiting every man in his humour,^ while the fifth 
act exhibits every man out of his humour; and the "humours" 
overmaster every other consideration. In the running criticisms 
of Mitis and Cordatus, the author's friends, in " Every Man out of 
his Humour," he is careful to point out that " herein his art 
appears most full of lustre, and approacheth nearest the life : " it 
is like the course of things in reality that his actors should for 
some time '' strongly pursue and continue their humours," and 
thereafter, in the flame and height of them, be suddenly laid flat. 
Macilente, Carlo Buffone, and others, in " Every Man out of his 
Humour " ; Amorphus in " Cynthia's Revels " ; Crispinus in " The 
Poetaster " ; Volpone and his dupes in " The Fox " ; Face and 
Subtle and their dupes in " The Alchemist " ; Overdo and his 
friends in "Bartholomew Fair" ; Fitzdottrel in "The Devil is an 
Ass " ; — all come to grief in the last act, after a triumphant career 
in their several humours. So far, Ben Jonson's comedies are well- 
ordered and regular — so far they have a rigorous and unbending 
unity ; but the connection between the various victims of tyran- 
nical humours is of the loosest kind, and there is no attempt at 
subtlety of construction or artful excitation of suspense in prepar- 
ing the way for the final coflapse : the whole interest lies in the 
representation of the characters and the incidents.- Probability, 
either of character or of incident, is about the last thing one would 
think of alleging. Ben Jonson's "humours," by his own defini- 
tion of them, are caricatures. It is ridiculous to suppose that they 
were taken from life : there never was any such drawing of the 
thoughts and feelings one way outside the walls of Bedlam. The 
" humour " of legacy-hunting was never so omnipotent over all 
effects, spirits, and powers, in real life, as it is made out to be in 

1 The word " humour " was much in use in Jonson's time. He complained that 
it was abused to signify any capricious fancy or affectation : a man wore a pied 
feather, or a cable hat-band, or a three-piled ruff, or a yard of shoe-tie, and called, 
it his humour. Nym, in Henry VI., uses it in a still looser sense. Jonson is careful 
to explain the signification of the term in his plays (" Every Man in his Humour," 
Induction). I need not quote his etymology at length — he often shows a scholarly 
hankering after etymological fancies — but his conclusion is, that the term may, by 
metaphor, apply itself — 

" Unto the general disposition; 
As when some one peculiar quality 
Doth so possess a man that it doth draw 
All his effects, his spirits, and his powers, 
In their confluctions all to run one way, 
This may be truly said to be a humour." 

2 The celebrated band of amateurs— including Charles Dickens and Mr G. H. 
Lewes — who acted " Every Man in his Humour" with such success, chose the play, 
I believe, chiefly on account of the number of good characters in it. 



BEN JONSON. 341 

" The Fox." And the incidents — such as the swooning of Fun- 
goso at sight of Brisk's new suit, the seaUng up of Buffone's 
mouth, the inexpressibly ludicrous tournament in court-compli- 
ment between Azotus and Mercury, the vomiting of Crispinus, 
&c., &c. — are conceived in the spirit of the wildest farce or the 
most bitterly exaggerated satire. There is, indeed, a parallel to 
Jonson's mad upsetting of things among the classics : Aristophanes 
is a devil of mirth no less fantastic and much more unconstrained 
than Jonson ; but we do not look to Aristophanes for good order, 
regularity, or " all the probabilities which the most rigid admirer 
of the ancient models could possibly demand." 

Jonson, indeed, explicitly professed his independence of correct 
classical models, and proclaimed his affinity with the older and 
more licentious forms. In the Induction to " Every Man out of 
his Humour," Cordatus, the man " inly acquainted with the scope 
and drift of the plot," explains that the play is "strange, and 
of a particular kind by itself, somewhat Hke ' Vetus Comoedia.' " 
" Does the author," asks Mitis, " observe all the laws of comedy 
in it, according to the Terentian manner? " " O no," replies Cor- 
datus, " these are too nice observations." He can discern no neces- 
sity for adhering to the Terentian model. The laws of comedy 
were not a revelation or a sudden inspiration of genius : each 
playwright reserved the fullest liberty to innovate upon his prede- 
cessors " according to the elegancy and disposition of those times 
wherein he wrote." " I see not then but we should enjoy the 
same licence, or free power to illustrate and heighten our inven- 
tion, as they did ; and not be tied to those strict and regular forms 
which the niceness of a few, who are nothing but form, would 
thrust upon us." It is a curious illustration of the bhndness of 
preconception that Gifford should have read this and yet persisted 
in magnifying Jonson as the apostle of regularity — the very thing 
that he contemptuously disclaimed. True, Jonson might not have 
understood himself. We know that, although he professed to 
cleanse the stage of ribaldry, foul and unwashed brothelry, and 
suchlike, he nevertheless, like many another professed and earnest 
morahst, drew in the interests of morality foul and disgusting pic- 
tures, quite as demoralising as anything that the most licentious 
dramatist ever ventured to portray. None of the Elizabethan 
dramatists exceed in unwashed filth some of the passages in " The 
Silent Woman " and " Bartholomew Fair." We should not have 
suspected that Jonson was an apostle of decency, if he had not told 
us. But in the matter of correctness and regularity, it needed no 
Cordatus, inly acquainted with the author's drift, to inform us that 
Jonson's study of " humours " is " strange, and of a particular kind 
by itself, somewhat like 'Vetus Comoedia,' " — a very remarkable 
outcome of a powerful and original mind, which was not very pop- 



342 SHAKESPEARE S CONTEMPORARIES. 

ular at the time, but which strongly affected the practice of con- 
temporary dramatists, and has been fully honoured by posterity. 

The only sense in which correctness can be applied to Jonson is 
careful elaboration — laborious filling in of details. Whether in 
the exhibition of character, or in the description of places or things, 
he is never content with a bold sketch and a few significant par- 
ticulars. The characteristic of plodding dogged thoroughness runs 
through all his work, but is most conspicuous and obtrusive in 
passages where he has an opportunity of displaying technical 
knowledge, — as when he expounds the stock-in-trade and the 
business cares of a draper, or the various vessels and other imple- 
ments of an alchemist's laboratory, or the ingredients of a fine 
lady's cosmetic or a witch's charm, or the precise language of the 
acknowledged processes for raising the devil, or transmuting the 
baser metals into gold. It is in studying this peculiarity that we 
get a just idea of the vastness of Jonson's scholarship, his prodi- 
gious patience of research, and strength of memory. His scholar- 
ship was not so much an athletic scholarship, like Spenser's, as a 
vast knowledge of all sorts of dry details from all sorts of sources ; 
and Avhen we consider the extent of it, we cannot sufficiently 
admire the power and the patience that have compelled it into 
dramatic existence, and endowed it with a certain dramatic fife. 

We need not dwell on Ben Jonson's tragedies, " Sejanus " and 
" Catiline." His warmest admirers have not much to say in 
favour of them. " CatiUne " is better than '' Sejanus," but even 
" Catiline " wants the elements of an effective drama. Looking at 
these tragedies, I am wholly at a loss to understand M. Taine's 
opinion that Jonson possesses in an eminent degree the art of 
development, of drawing up ideas in connected rank. The primary 
rule of development is to present your audience first with the broad 
outlines, and then to fill in the details clearly. This is the rule 
of development observed by Shakespeare and by all conscious or 
unconscious masters of the art of presentation. But this rule is 
not observed by Johnson : in spite of his Herculean efforts to 
marshal his vast scholarship, he was too much overwhelmed by it 
to put his readers in clear possession of character and situation by 
bold decisive strokes and well-judged and opportune sequence. 
Compare the opening of his "Sejanus" with the opening of 
"Titus Andronicus." In "Titus Andronicus " the dramatist had 
to deal with numerous characters and complicated relations, yet 
we take them all in at our first reading of the first act : the leading 
parties are brought boldly and clearly on the stage at once in such 
a way as to command our interest, and minor relations appear as 
we proceed with perfectly-judged sequence. The same may be 
seen in Shakespeare's more mature Roman dramas, " JuHus Caesar" 
and " Coriolanus." In " Sejanus," on the other hand, laborious 



BEN JONSON. 343 

attention and several readings of the opening passages are needed 
before we comprehend the situation. Two unimportant personages 
come in with long-winded talk about the arts of worldly advance- 
ment, and describe some half-dozen characters in a string in such 
a way that the sharpest hearer must get bewildered as to their 
relative positions and claims upon his interest. It seems to me 
that M. Taine must have formed his opinion of Jonson's skill in 
development from observing his persistent iteration throughout 
each play of the main characteristics of his personages, and his 
habit of expounding the intention of important passages, as if he 
could not trust to the unaided understanding of the audience. 
Thus Ben hammers into us the daring, forward, impetuous char- 
acter of Cethegus ; and before the scene in which Catiline practises 
to win over allies, makes the arch- conspirator unfold to his wife 
how he means to work upon their various weaknesses. But this is 
not so much skilful development as superfluous care and weak dis- 
trust of the intelligence of his hearers. 

In Jonson's comedies there are occasional passages that may 
justly be called tragic, but they belong to low, coarse, revolting 
tragedy. The misanthropy of Macilente in " Every Man out of 
his Humour " is tragic ; it is the Timonism of a thoroughly ill- 
conditioned foul-mouthed churl. The scene between Volpone, 
Corvino, and Celia (" The Fox," iii. 5) — the foul abuse of his wife 
by Corvino, and the struggle between Volpone and Celia — is mon- 
strously tragic : if the moralist desired to heal spiritual diseases 
by such an exhibition, he has not scrupled to administer a very 
strong medicine. The opening scene of " The Alchemist," be- 
tween the sharpers Subtle and Face and their confederate and 
common mistress Dol, might pass in a modern sensational drama 
from the south side of the Thames but for the coarseness and the 
power of the language : it is a unique revelation of hellish discord 
and odious patching up of a villanous alliance ; and its initiatory 
fascination was doubtless a chief cause in making ''The Alchemist '' 
Jonson's most successful play. 

The most generally pleasing remains of Jonson's genius are hi? 
occasional songs, his Masques, and his " Sad Shepherd." The 
"Sad Shepherd" is not quite complete; but, though not without 
a few blots and stains, it contains some of Jonson's finest poetry. 
The shepherdess xA.mie is such a sweet creation that one is indig- 
nant at the dramatist for the vulgar and wholly superfluous 
immodesty of one of her expressions in her first confession of 
unrest : to the pure all things are pure, but it exposes the simple 
shepherdess to unnecessary ridicule from the ordinary reader. 
One is surprised to find such sympathy with simple innocence in 
rare but rough Ben — all the more that the " Sad Shepherd " was 
written in his later years, when he was exacerbated by failure and 
poverty. 



344 SHAKESPEARE S CONTEMPORARIES. 

" I do remember, Marian, I have oft 
With pleasure kist my lambs and puppies soft; 
And once a tlainty tine roe-fawn I had, 
Of whose out-skipping bounds I was as glad 
As of my health; and him I oft would kiss; 
Yet had his no such sting or pain as this : 
They never prick'd or hurt my heart ; and for 
They were so blunt and dull, I wish no more. 
But this that hurts and pricks doth please; this sweet 
Mingled with sour, I wish again to meet : 
And that delay, methinks, most tedious is 
That keeps or hinders me of Karol's kiss." 



IV. — Thomas Dekker (157 7- 163 8). 

The skirmish between Marston, Jonson, and Dekker, is one of 
the most famous "quarrels of authors." Who gave the first of- 
fence is a matter of dispute : Jonson said it was Marston and Dek- 
ker, and Dekker said it was Jonson. When Jonson caricatured 
Marston as Crispinus the Poetaster, with a very sHght passing 
thrust at Dekker under the name of Demetrius, he professed that 
he had received information of their intention to attack him ; and 
when Dekker rephed with " Satiromastrix, or The Untrussing of 
the Humorous Poet," he read Johnson a dignified lecture on his 
jealous disposition, and represented himself and Marston as acting 
reluctantly in self-defence. On which side the truth lies, it is im- 
possible to say ; the facts are against Jonson, inasmuch as he 
struck the first blow ; and his alleged acquaintance with the evil 
intentions of Marston and Dekker is such as might easily have 
been inserted between the first acting of "The Poetaster," and the 
publication of it.^ At any rate, Dekker had very much the best 
of the contest. From Gifford's saying that " Dekker writes in 
downright passion, and foams through every page," we should in- 
fer that he had never read " Satiromastrix," were it not the case 
that he makes mistakes equally gross concerning plays that he 
must have read. Dekker writes with the greatest possible light- 
ness of heart, easy mockery, and free abuse. It is absurd to say 
that he " makes no pretensions to invention, but takes up the 
characters of his predecessor, and turns them the seamy side 
without." Tucca is the only character that he borrows, and a 
very ingenious idea it is — one of the best parts of the joke — to set 
Johnson's own free-spoken swaggerer to abuse himself. Dekker 's 
Tucca is much more ably wrought out than Jonson's ; he has a 
much finer command of what Widow Minever calls " horrible un- 

1 All the part of Demetrius looks as if it had been inserted after Jonson was 
informed of Dekker's intention to " untruss him" in revenge of Marston, 



THOMAS DEKKER. 



345 



godly names " ; and his devices to obtain money are equally shame- 
less and amusing. All the other characters, and what plot there 
is, are Dekker's own ; he, of course, uses the names Horace, Cris- 
pinus, and Demetrius, otherwise there would have been no point 
in his reply — but he gives them very different characters. Wil- 
liam Rufus, whom Gifford supposed to be the " rude and ignorant 
soldier " of that name, is conjectured to have been no other than 
Shakespeare — " learning's true Maecenas, poesy's King " ; and per- 
haps to a playwright like Dekker, Shakespeare might appear a 
true Maecenas, although at first sight one would naturally think 
rather of the Earl of Pembroke or some other noble patron of 
letters. I am surprised that so able a critic as Mr Symonds 
should say that '' Satiromastrix " is not to be named in the same 
breath with the " Poetaster," and that its success must have been 
due to the acting. To be sure it does not reproduce the Court of 
Augustus with the same verisimiHtude — its flight is much too 
light-winged and madding for any such scholarly achievement. 
The Court of Augustus would have broken the continuity of the 
play with yawning intervals ; the frail, fallible, and romantic 
Court of William Rufus is more in keeping with its ebullient and 
victorious humour. " Satiromastrix," the castigation of the sat- 
irist, is not in itself a satire so much as a genial confident mock- 
ery : it accomplished the main end of such productions — the 
applause of the playgoers ; and I must confess that I for one 
should have been inclined to give the clever rogue a hand, how- 
ever badly his counterblast had been put on the stage. 

Of Dekker's personal history few particulars are known. The 
dates both of his birth and of his death are only approximate con- 
jectures. He seems to have made his living by plays, pageants, 
and prose pamphlets, and to have been almost as prolific and ver- 
satile as Defoe, although his labours did not always suffice to keep 
him out of " the Counter in the Poultry," and the King's Bench 
Prison. He is first named in ' Henslowe's Diary ' in 1597, and he 
would seem to have been conjoined with Chettle, Haughton, Day, 
and Jonson on several plays before the close of the century. The 
first play published as his was "The Shoemaker's Holiday," in 
1600: and the subsequent list is — "The Pleasant Comedy of 
Old Fortunatus," 1600; "Satiromastrix," 1602; "Patient Gris- 
sel " (in conjunction with Chettle and Haughton), 1603; "The 
Honest Whore " (Part I.), 1604 ; "The Whore of Babylon," 1607 ; 
" Westward Ho ! " " Northward Ho ! " and " Sir Thomas Wyatt " 
(in conjunction with Webster), 1607; "The Roaring Girl" (in 
conjunction with Middleton), 161 1 ; " If it be not Good, the Devil 
is in it," 161 2 ; "The Virgin Martyr" (in conjunction with Mas- 
singer), 1622 ; " Match me in London," 1631 ; " The Wonder of a 
Kingdom," 1636 ; " The Sun's Darling " (not published till 1656) ; 



34^ Shakespeare's contemporaries. 

and "The Witch of Edmonton," 1658 (written in conjunction 
with Ford). 

Dekker was a man of less determined painstaking than Chap- 
man or Jonson, but of greater natural quickness and fineness of 
vision, more genial warmth of sympathy, and more copious spon- 
taneity of expression. The fertility of his conception and the 
sweetness of his verse were not surpassed by any of his great con- 
temporaries : his melting tenderness of sympathy and light play 
of humour are peculiarly his own. He had more in common with 
Shakespeare than with any of the three sturdy writers whom we 
have been discussing. Hazlitt complains of Shakespeare's comic 
Muse, as such, that it is " too good-natured and magnanimous," 
that it " does not take the highest pleasure in making human 
nature look as mean, as ridiculous, and as contemptible as possi- 
ble." This is plainly a characteristic of Shakespeare's comedy as 
distinguished from the Terentian manner ; but I should not call 
it a fault. I know no reason why this should be placed outside 
the limits of what is strictly called comedy. I should be inclined 
to call this the crowing excellence of English comedy — that it is 
able to present such a web of the admirable and the ridiculous as 
life itself appears when viewed in a pleasant mood. This is the 
kind of comedy that Dekker naturally pursued. He had a very 
strong propensity towards fun, darted into every opening that 
promised laughter with the gleefulness of a boy ; but he had also 
a strong love for the virtues, and a genial belief in human good- 
ness, and delighted to picture an honest citizen, a repentant sin- 
ner, a relenting father, a merciful prince. Neither his humour 
nor his love for gentleness of heart was diminished by his poverty 
and frequent distress. If Dekker, as Jonson said, " was a rogue 
and not to be trusted," he always took a kinder and more lenient 
view of humanity than appears in the plays of his enemy, — the 
stern scourge of vice and folly. Dekker's genius had many points 
of resemblance with Chaucer's. 

If, with Hamlet, we take the purpose of playing to be " to show 
virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age 
and body of the time his form and pressure," Dekker must receive 
a high place among the dramatists. There is none of them that 
has preserved so many lifelike intimations of the state of the 
various classes of society in that age. His plots are loosely con- 
structed ; but occasional scenes are wrought out with the utmost 
vividness, and the most complete and subtle exhibition of char- 
acter and habits. Dekker's being born in London, and his excep- 
tional acquaintance with strange bedfellows in the course of his 
miserable life, gave him an advantage as the abstract and brief 
chronicle of the time over Shakespeare, who was bred in the coun- 
try, and passed a comparatively prosperous and respectable life 



THOMAS MIDDLETON. 34/ 

in London — apart altogether from the fact that Shakespeare's 
imagination would not let him rest content with so close a 
transcript of nature. 



V. — Thomas Middleton (15 70-162 7). 

Middleton has not Dekker's lightness of touch and ethereal 
purity of tenderness, but there are qualities in which he comes 
nearer than any contemporary dramatist to the master mind of 
the time. There is a certain imperial confidence in his use of 
words and imagery, a daring originality and impatient force of 
expression, an easy freedom of humour, wide of range yet thor- 
oughly well in hand, such as we find in the same degree even in 
that age of giants in no Elizabethan saving only Shakespeare. 
It was as a comedian that Middleton first made his reputation, 
about the year 1607, comparatively late in life; and it would 
seem that he despaired of obtaining recognition for his powers 
in tragedy, for two of his most striking performances in that 
kind are interwoven with comic stories and the whole plays 
named after leading characters in the comic under-plot. Nobody 
would expect from the title of the '' Mayor of Queenborough," the 
intensity and force that Middleton shows in the tragic scenes 
of that play. The title seems to require our attention for the 
humorous antics of the Mayor, Simon the tanner, an imitation 
of Dekker's Simon Eyre the shoemaker. Mayor of London. And 
similarly in "The Changeling," which Middleton wrote in con- 
junction with Rowley, the dramatists seem to modestly intimate 
that they set store chiefly on the comic portions. Yet there are 
tragic passages in "The Changeling" unsurpassed for intensity 
of passion and appalling surprises in the whole range of Eliza- 
bethan literature. That these scenes were devised and written 
by Middleton will hardly be doubted by anybody acquainted 
with "The Mayor of Queenborough," and his later pure tragedy, 
"Women Beware Women." This last play is literally open to Jon- 
son's sarcastic note on " Hamlet " — " Here the play of necessity 
ends, all the actors being killed." The slaughter in "Women 
Beware Women" extends to every character honoured with a name. 
Regarded as wholes, Middleton's tragedies fall very far short of 
the dignity of Shakespeare's. His heroes and heroines are not 
made of the same noble stuff, and their calamities have not the 
same grandeur. The characters are all so vile that the pity and 
terror produced by their death is almost wholly physical. But 
in the expression of incidental moments of passion, Middleton 
often rises to a sublime pitch of energy. 

It may have been that Middleton, though only six years younger 



34^ Shakespeare's contemporaries. 

than Shakespeare, was born too late for tragedy. A complaint 
is made in " The Roaring Girl," in the composition of which he 
was conjoined with Dekker, that tragedies had gone out of 
fashion. " In the time of the great crop doublet," it is said, 
" your huge bombasted plays quilted with mighty words to lean 
purpose, were only then in the fashion ; and as the doublet fell, 
neater inventions began to be set up." Under King James the 
taste was all for " light colour summer stuff, mingled with divers 
colours." Thus by the time that Middleton came into favour 
as a playwright, the atmosphere of the theatre was not encourag- 
ing to tragic composition. How far this influenced him in the 
devotion of his versatile powers to comedy, and how much was 
due to his individual character, it is of course impossible now to 
determine, for we have nothing but his plays to judge by. He 
began his literary life, like Marston, as a satirist, writing in the 
style popular at the end of the sixteenth century ; but he achieved 
no great success in this artificial line of composition. His first 
triumph as a writer of comedy would seem to have been " A Trick 
to Catch the Old One." ^ This, along with four others, was 
licensed in 1607. Chapman's "All Fools," the great exemplar 
and prototype of the English comedy of " gulling," had taken the 
town two years before, and Middleton threw himself into the 
fashion. In this type of comedy he is exceedingly happy, and 
surpasses his masters in ingenuity of construction, and easy accumu- 
lation of mirthful circumstances. The fun begins early, and goes 
on to the end with accelerating speed. Middleton excels peculiarly 
in the dramatic irony of making his gulls accessory to their own 
deception, and putting into their mouths statements that have, 
to those in the secret, a meaning very much beyond what they 
intend. "A Mad World, my Masters," hcensed in 1608, is one 
of his happiest efforts in this vein. As bearing on Jonson's de- 
scription of him as " a base fellow," it may be remarked that he 
professes to be more decent than some of his predecessors, and 
has a gird apparently at Marston or Jonson, as some obscene 
fellow, who cares not what he writes against others, yet rips 
up the most nasty vice in his own plays, and presents it to a 
modest assembly. It is the excellency of a writer, says Middleton, 
to leave things better than he finds them. According to this prin- 
ciple, in the "Trick to Catch the Old One," and the "Mad 
World," the courtesans are married and made honest women — 
the rakes are reclaimed ; and though no lessen is weightily incul- 

1 This play furnished the plot of Massinger's " New Way to Pay Old Debts." 
The titles of the plays, in fact, are interchangeable : both the scapegrace heroes 
extract by the same device rather more than their rights from usurious and 
grasping uncles. The character of Sir Giles has more force than any creation 
of Middleton's ; but the germ of the character was probably taken from Middle- 
ton's " Pecunious Lucre," or Sir Alexander Wargrave in " The Roaring Girl." 



JOHN FLETCHER. 349 

cated, there is less indecency than in the works of more preten- 
tious morahsts. 

Middleton's name has of late been revived in connection with 
the authorship of "Macbeth." It has been conjectured, on the 
ground of certain slight coincidences between Middleton's play 
and the witch scenes, that Middleton had a hand in the composi- 
tion of " Macbeth." ^ The supposition is about as gromidless as 
any ever made in connection with Shakespeare, which is saying a 
good deal. Even if either author borrowed the words of the song 
from the other, that is no evidence of further co-operation. The 
plays are wholly different in spirit. " The Witch " is by no means 
one of Middleton's best plays. The plot is both intricate and 
feeble ; and the witches, in spite of Charles Lamb's exquisite 
comparison of them with Shakespeare's, are, as stage creations, 
essentially comic and spectacular. With their ribald revelry, their 
cauldrons, their hideous spells and weird incantations, they are 
much more calculated to excite laughter than fear as exhibited on 
the stage, however much fitted to touch the chords of superstitious 
dread when transported by the imagination to their native wilds. 
The characters of the play do not treat them with sufficient respect 
to command the sympathy of the audience for them. Familiarity 
breeds contempt : if they had been consulted only by the Duchess 
with a view to the murder of her husband, they might have kept 
up an appearance of dignity and terror; but when the drunk 
Almachildes staggers in among them, upsets some of the beldams, 
and is received by Hecate as a favoured lover, we cease to have 
much respect for them, even though they do profess to exercise 
the terrible power of raising jars, jealousies, strifes, and heart- 
burning disagreements Hke a thick scarf o'er life. The visit of 
the fantastical gentleman whom Hecate has thrice enjoyed in 
incubus, is a very happy inspiration in the same vein as Tam o' 
Shanter's admiration of the heroine of Alloway Kirk : the scene 
is a fine opportunity for a comic actor ; but it is damaging to the 
respectability of the dread Hecate. 

VI. — John Fletcher (15 79-1625). 

It is not without compunction that one ventures to dissolve 
the long-established union between the names of Beaumont and 
Fletcher, and to characterise the second and principal member 

1 The chief resemblances are, that both poets introduce Hecate as the queen of 
the witches, and that the songs " Come away" and " Black Spirits," of which only 
the ti. St words are given in " Macbeth," are set down in full in " The Witch." 
" The Witch " was not printed till 1778, when it was discovered in MS. by Mr Isaac 
Reed. If the songs were popular witch-songs, whether written before or after 
Shakespeare wrote " Macbeth," they may have been adopted in the stage copy of 
the play. 



350 SHAKESPEARE S SUCCESSORS. 

by himself. The rigour of my plan demands it. There are 
ample materials for forming an estimate of Fletcher, because he 
wrote plays unassisted probably before, and certainly after, his 
partnership with Beaumont ; while in groping after the character 
of Beaumont we must trust chiefly to imperfect materials — a 
masque, a few poems, vague traditions, and arbitrary recognition 
of portions of his joint work with Fletcher. If there had been 
marked differences between the plays written by Fletcher alone, 
and those written by him in conjunction with Beaumont, one 
might have proceeded with some confidence to allocate their 
respective shares in the joint compositions. But I must confess 
for myself that there is no passage in any of the joint plays that 
I could affirm with any confidence not to be Fletcher's — not to 
contain traces of his hand. Of the three plays in which it is 
known for certain that Beaumont took part — the *' Maid's 
Tragedy," " Philaster," and " A King and No King" — all have 
the same complexion as Fletcher's single compositions, similar 
characters, similar sentiments, and similar impelling forces. One 
would expect the metre to be a good criterion of separate identity. 
The abundance of feminine endings in Fletcher's undoubted verse, 
and his habit of running one line into another, have been sug- 
gested as tests ; but the application of these tests is rendered 
uncertain by the fact that they do not apply to Fletcher's 
" Faithful Shepherdess." We cannot pick out certain passages 
as being Beaumont's, simply on the ground that they contain 
a smaller proportion of feminine endings than certain other pas- 
sages which may be supposed to be Fletcher's. On the whole, I 
see no reason to doubt the opinion current during the reign of 
Charles I., and communicated by Bishop Earle to Aubrey, that 
Beaumont's chief share in the plays lay in correcting the exuber- 
ance of Fletcher. Almost all the commendatory poems prefixed 
to the edition of 1647 — poems by Denham, Waller, Lovelace, 
Herrick, Lowell, Cartwright, Richard Brome, &c. — are addressed 
to Fletcher alone. Richard Brome, Jonson's servant and pupil, 
who knew Fletcher intimately, and was as likely as any m^i to 
be aware of the exact relationship between the two dramatists, 
gives all the glory to Fletcher. The truth probably is, that Beau- 
mont applied his superior judgment to the task of amending 
Fletcher's first drafts, seeing that his prolific partner was strongly 
averse to the labour of correction. I cannot say that there is 
any one scene in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher which I 
should feel warranted in assigning to Beaumont alone, although 
it is quite possible that he contributed whole Scenes, if not whole 
Acts. 

All the dramatists hitherto considered in our survey agree in 
being men of humble extraction, who had to fight their way in 



JOHN FLETCHER. 35 I 

the world through manifold difficulties. Fletcher is only partly 
an exception to this agreement. He was the son of a Kentish 
clergyman, who rose to the rank of bishop ; but his father died in 
1596, when he was seventeen years old, and left a widow and a 
large family in distressed circumstances. Five years before his 
father's death, Fletcher had entered Bennet College, Cambridge, 
and he was resident there in 1593. No other particulars of his 
private hfe have been ascertained. He seems to have begun to 
write for the stage about 1606, the supposed date of his " Woman- 
Hater" ; and before he was cut off by the plague in 1625, he had 
written or co-operated in writing no less than sixty plays. 

Fletcher entered the dramatic field when the rivalry of wit was 
at its hottest. He belonged to the hghter build of combatants — 
the saucy bark, rather than the imperious, proud, full sail. It is 
significant of his personal appearance that his portraits were con- 
sidered failures : there was no catching the quick play of his 
vivacious features. His first dramatic effort — if the " Woman- 
Hater" is so — was in the mock-heroic vein, and gave proof of a 
comic genius second only to Shakespeare's. There are two comic 
heroes in the play — Gondarino, a ridiculously ill-conditioned and 
techy hater of women ; and Lazarillo, a fanatic and insatiable 
gourmand. Gondarino's sourness takes the fancy of a mischief- 
loving young lady, Oriana, who amuses herself and gives rise to 
some most ludicrous scenes by making violent love to the old 
porcupine, very much to his disgust. In the pursuit of her whim, 
however, she compromises herself by equivocal behaviour, and 
narrowly escapes falling a victim to the cynic's ludicrously diaboh- 
cal project of revenge. Alongside this series of incidents, and 
partly intei-woven with them, runs the mock-heroic passion of 
Lazarillo, whose sole aim in hfe is to get possession of dainty 
food without paying for it. His goddess is Plenty, and his daily 
prayer to her is, " Fill me this day with some rare delicates." A 
sumptuous feast is the sacrifice that he vows to perform. Bills of 
fare are his holy scriptures, which he never fails to take up with 
reverence. Lazarillo's page, whose office it is to haunt the kitchens 
of the great, and bring instant word of forthcoming dishes, in order 
that his master may devise stratagems and ambuscades to procure 
a taste of them, one day reports that the Duke's table is to be 
graced by — the head of an Umbrana. "Is it possible?" cries 
Lazarillo; "can heaven be so propitious to the Duke?" And 
forthwith he vows to pursue this Umbrana's head with all his 
strength, mind, and heart. He procures an introduction to the 
Duke, only to find that the Duke has sent the object of his 
idolatry to Gondarino : when good fortune has thrown Gondarino 
in his way, and he is beginning to rejoice, he finds that it has 
gone to Gondarino's mercer : when he has skilfully engineered an 



352 SHAKESPEARE S SUCCESSORS. 

invitation to dine with the mercer, he finds that, the mercer has 
sent it to a woman of doubtful fame. After these and other 
checks at moments when the Umbrana's head was almost between 
his teeth, he at last attains it by marrying the mercer's mistress. 
The intensity of Lazarillo's passion for the rare morsel, his ecstasies 
when he is on the point of attaining it, his profound dejection and 
distraction after each temporary repulse to his hopes, are in the 
maddest vein of mock-heroism. 

The "Woman-Hater" is a good introduction to Fletcher's gay 
and daring humour. He indulged it without much regard for 
decency : he had less veneration than Shakespeare to check him : 
he is more coolly contemptuous in laying serious respectabilities 
by the heels. The " Faithful Shepherdess " gives us a more 
beautiful side of his character, developed with the same free- 
dom and abandonment of himself to the full swing of a ruling 
sentiment. This masque, though naturally enough condemned 
when put on the public stage as a drama, furnished Milton 
with a model for his " Comus," and is in itself one of the finest 
monuments of our moralising pastoral poetry. Fletcher throws 
himself unreservedly into the loves and crosses of Amoret and 
Perigot, and the pious austerity of the bereaved Clorin, and lets 
his imagination revel in picturing the scene of their adventures. 
The wood where the mistakes of a night are enacted is very 
fitting for a romantic drama : — 

" For in that holy wood is consecrate 
A virtuous well, about whose flowery banks 
The nimble-footed fairies dance their rounds 
By the pale moonshine, dipping often-times 
Their stolen children, so to make them free 
From dying flesh and dull mortality. 
By this fair fount hath many a shepherd sworn 
And given away his freedom; many a troth 
Been plighted, which nor Envy nor old Time 
Could ever break, with many a chaste kiss given, 
In hope of coming happiness." 

The mad irrepressible humour of the poet, however, broke 
through the sweet surface of his romantic conception : he spoiled 
his paradise by introducing, as evil principles, the wantons Cloe 
and Alexis, and the malignant Sullen Shepherd, and investing 
them with characters so disgusting, that their gross humour, 
instead of operating as an elevating contrast, tends rather to 
throw a taint of ridicule on the whole composition. 

From Dryden down to Coleridge, all Fletcher's critics have 
remarked his success in representing the easy and animated 
conversation of young gentlemen. Don John in the " Chances," 
Mirabel in the " Wild Goose Chase/' Cleremont in the *' Little 



JOHN FLETCHER. 353 

French Lawyer," Don Jamie and Leandro in the " Spanish 
Curate," Monsieur Thomas, and many others, use much less 
abstruse language than Shakespeare's Biron, Gratiano, Benedick, 
and suchlike, and language consequently better suited to the 
mouths of young men of blood and fashion. The truth is, 
that Fletcher's easy, rapid, copious style, preserved by his good 
taste and sense of humour from conceits, and by his superficial 
nature from any kind of depth or intricacy, approaches nearer 
the language of polite conversation than the style of any of his 
contemporaries : the ease and sprightliness is not specially put on 
for young men of spirit, but is a pervading characteristic of his 
style. There is a similar dash and abandonment in the language 
of all his personages : he throws himself heartily and impetuously, 
but not deeply, into a situation, and expresses the sentiment of 
the moment with unfailing abundance of clear, bright-coloured, 
gracious, and noble words. 

Apart from his fertile humour, which is no less varied than un- 
scrupulous, the main charm of Fletcher lies in the plentiful stream of 
simple ideas and readily understood feelings, expressed in felicitous 
and animated language. When we try to grasp the consistency of 
his characters, and regard his plays as wholes, we discover many 
evidences of weak characterisation and hasty construction. It is 
remarkable how few of his personages are throughout admirable, 
beautiful, or venerable ; and this arises not from cynical purpose, 
as in Jonson, but from sketchiness and shallowness of conception. 
He is fond of delineating exemplarily virtuous women ; but chastity 
is too often and too prominently their sole claim upon our interest, 
and many of them pollute their hps with language the reverse of 
lovely. His magnanimous heroes, also, harp too much on one 
string : he could not have ventured to show a hero in his domestic 
and playful side, as Shakespeare does with Hotspur. And many 
of his personages, both male and female — Sorano, Protaldye, 
Brunhalt, &c. &c. — are abominably vile, — vile almost beyond 
parallel. One cannot say that in the plays pruned by the revision 
or enlarged by the co-operation of Beaumont, there is much differ- 
ence in these respects. There are exquisite passages in the sad 
stories of Aspatia and Euphrasia, as there are in the stories of 
Amoret or Evanthe, showing them to be children of the same 
delicate fancy; but there is a want of body in the appeal that 
they make to our sympathies : they are, besides, brought into too 
close contact with the pitch that defiles. And both the " Maid's 
Tragedy" and "Philaster" are seriously disfigured by the ignoble 
and repulsive character of the impelUng forces : the shameless 
intrigue of Evadne and the king is too violent an outrage on de- 
cency, too base and animal, to permit any dignity to envelop its 
tragic consequences ; and the easy credence given to the filthy 



354 SHAKESPEARE S SUCCESSORS. 

accusations of Megra, so base, unsupported, and obviously mali- 
cious, makes us look upon the hero as a fool, and seriously affects 
his claims to our interest and admiration. 



VIL — John Webster (?). 

Dekker's partner in "Westward Ho ! " " Northward Ho ! " and 
" Sir Thomas Wyatt," was to all appearance as different from him- 
self as one man of genius could be from another — a man who sank 
deep shafts into the mines of tragedy, and built up his plays with 
profound design and deliberate care. Dekker is not more remark- 
able for his genial reproduction of city life in loosely contrived scenes, 
and for his easy unstudied sympathy with deep heart's-sorrowing 
and keen heart's-bitterness, than Webster is for his penetrating grasp 
of character, meditated construction of intricate scenes, and elabo- 
rate, just, and powerful treatment of terrible situations. One would 
expect from the joint work of two such men results of the most 
supreme kind — plays that might compete with the unrivalled Shake- 
speare. But the excellent qualities of two men cannot be fused into 
one work of art : two minds cannot work as one with the united 
strength of the strong faculties of both. Of the three joint plays 
of Dekker and Webster, two of them, " Westward Ho ! " and 
" Northward Ho ! " are not distinguishable from the unaided pro- 
ductions of Dekker ; while the third, '' Sir Thomas Wyatt," in 
the mutilated and imperfect shape that has been handed down to 
us, contains strong marks of Webster, and may be regarded as 
being, in great part, the first effort of his powerful genius. 

Concerning Webster's life one can only repeat the same tale of 
ignorance that must be told concerning so many of our dramatists. 
He was born free of the Merchant Tailors' Company ; began to 
write for the stage as early as 1601 ; and we may conjecture, from 
his predilection for scenes in courts of law and his elaborate treat- 
ment of them, that he had been bred to the profession. His 
quotations show that he had at least been taught Latin, and so far 
had received a learned education. His fame rests on three trage- 
dies and a tragic comedy, — "Vittoria Corombona, the White 
Devil," published in 161 2 ; " The Duchess of Malfi," 1623 ; " The 
Devil's Law-Case," a tragi-comedy, 1623 ; and " Appius and Vir- 
ginia," not published till 1654.^ 

In the preface to *'Vittoria Corombona," Webster defends him- 
self against the charge of being a slow composer. We find this 

1 Mr E. Gosse argues that the main plot in "A Cure for a Cuckold" is Web- 
ster's, But the share of each of two joint authors must always be doubtful. See 
article on Middleton, ' Academy,' August 22, 1885. 



JOHN WEBSTER. 355 

charge also in a contemporary satirist (' Notes from Blackfriars,' 
1620), who draws a very hvely picture of " crabbed Websterio " : — 

" See how he draws his mouth awry of late, 
How he scrubs, wrings his wrists, scratches his pate; 
A midwife, help ! . . . . 

Here's not a word cursively I have writ 
But he'll industriously examine it; 
And in some twelve months thence, or thereabout, 
Set in a shameful sheet my errors out/' 

Webster does not deny the charge ; but he answers his critics with 
a bold tradition : " Alcestides objecting that Euripides had only 
in three days composed three verses, whereas himself had written 
three hundred; 'Thou tellest truth,' quoth he, 'but here's the 
difference : thine shall only be read for three days, whereas mine 
shall continue three ages.' " Webster's characters could not have 
been drawn nor his scenes constructed in a hurry. Appius and 
Romelio are unsurpassed as broad and elaborate studies, filled in 
with indefatigable detail and accommodated with subtle art to a 
profound conception. In following these masterpieces the student 
of character is kept in an ecstasy of delight by stroke after stroke 
of the most unerring art. In every other scene their replies and 
ways of taking things surprise us, yet every such paradox on 
reflection is seen to accord with the central conception of their 
character, and increases our admiration of the dramatist's deep 
insight and steady grasp. And these plays are not merely closet- 
plays, whose excellences can be picked out and admired only at 
leisure. The characters have not the simplicity and popular in- 
telligibility of Shakespeare's Richard or lago. The plots, too, 
except in " Appius and Virginia," where all the incidents lie in the 
direct line of the catastrophe, are involved with obscure windings 
and turnings. Yet all the scenes are carefully constructed for 
dramatic effect. Mark how studious Webster has been that his 
actors shall never go lamely off the stage : they make their exit 
at happily chosen moments, and with some remark calculated to 
leave a buzz of interest behind them. When we look closely into 
Webster's plays we become aware that no dramatist loses more in 
closet perusal : all his dialogues were written with a careful eye to 
the stage. Everywhere throughout his plays we meet with marks 
of deep meditation and just design. It is not with his plays as 
with Fletcher's. The more we study Webster, the more we find to 
admire. His characters approach nearer to the many-sidedness of 
real men and women than those of any dramatist except Shake- 
speare ; and his exhibition of the changes of feeling wrought in 
them by the changing progress of events, though characterised by 
less of revealing instinct and more of penetrating effort than appear 
in Shakespeare, is hardly less powerful and true. 



356 Shakespeare's successors. 

Webster did not attempt comedy, unless in conjunction with 
Dekker, and before he had felt where his strength lay. The 
moral saws wrought into his dialogues show that his meditations 
held chiefly to the dark side of the world. In forming our impres- 
sion of the man, we are perhaps unduly dominated by the conclud- 
ing scenes of " Vittoria Corombona" and "The Duchess of Malfi " : 
it is from these scenes that he has received the name of " the ter- 
rible Webster." It showed a strange ignorance of his own power 
that in the preface to "Vittoria" he regretted that the nature of 
the English stage would not permit him to write sententious tragedy 
after the model of the ancients, " observing all the critical laws, as 
height of style and gravity of person, enriching it with the senten- 
tious chorus, and, as it were, enlivening death in the passionate and 
weighty nuntius." He does undoubtedly observe height of style, 
and his persons are exempt from meanness and ignobility. Un- 
controllable passionate love, and a temporary insanity of avarice 
pursued with subtle policy and bitterly repented of, are the chief 
impelling forces of his four great plays ; and even inferior instru- 
ments of villany, such as Ludowick, Flamineo, and Bosola, are 
invested with a certain dignity. But that Webster should have 
desired to relate those terrific death-scenes instead of exhibiting 
them as he has done, showed a strange obliviousness of the basis 
of his own fame and the excellence of modern tragedy. Not to 
mention his grander scenes, how tame and unimpressive would 
have been the fate of the poisoned Brachiano in the narrative 
of a messenger to his beloved mistress Vittoria, compared with 
what it is when we are brought face to face with the fearfully 
punished sinner and the passionately interested witnesses of his 
agony. 

"Brack. Oh! I am gone already. The infection 

Flies to the brain and heart. O thou strong heart ! 

There's such a covenant 'tween the world and it, 

They're loath to break. 

Giovanni. O my most loved father ! 
Brack. Remove the boy away : 

Where's this good woman? had I infinite worlds, 

They are too little for thee. Must I leave thee? 

What say you, screech-owls? is the venom mortal? 
Pkysician. Most deadly. 
Brack. Most corrupted, politic hangman! 

You kill without book ; but your art to save 

Fails you as oft as great men's needy friends. 

I that have given life to offending slaves 

And wretched murderers, have I not power 

To lengthen mine own a twelvemonth? 

Do not kiss me, for I shall poison thee ; 

This unction is sent from the Great Duke of Florence. 

Fran, de Medici \Jiis enemy the Great Duke in disguise']. Sir, 

be of comfort. 
Brack. O thou soft natural death, that art joint-twin 



CYRIL TOURNEUR. 357 

To sweetest slumber ! no rough-bearded comet 
Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl 
Beats not against thy casement; the hoarse wolf 
Scents not thy carrion. Pity winds thy corse 
Whilst horror waits on princes. 

Viiioria Coromliona. I am lost for ever ! 

Brack. How miserable a thing it is to die 
'Mongst women howling! what are those? 

Flamineo. Franciscans. 
They have brought the extreme unction. 

Brack. On pain of death let no man name death to me : 
It is a word most infinitely terrible. 
Withdraw into our cabinet." 

Brachiano's bidding Vittoria not kiss him or she will be poi- 
soned, is characteristic of Webster's subtle art. The wretched 
man had been moved by his passion for Vittoria, the " white 
devil," to poison his wife, and the deed had been heartlessly done 
by anointing with a deadly unction the lips of a picture of her 
husband which the poor lady was in the habit of kissing every 
night before she went to bed ; and this line at once shows the 
direction of Brachiano's franticly shifting thoughts, and brings the 
crime by a sudden flash side by side with the punishment and 
the impassioned motive. 

VIII. — Cyril Tourneur ( ?) . 

Tourneur's name will always be associated with Webster's, 
because his nature led him within the same circle of terrible sub- 
jects. Only two of his plays survive, the " Revenger's Tragedy " 
and the "Atheist's Tragedy" — the one first published in 1607, 
the other in 161 1. Nothing more is known about him, except 
that he wrote also a play called the " Nobleman," which was 
utilised by Warburton's cook. 

Tourneur was far from having the breadth and the weight of 
Webster's genius : he does not take so deep a hold of the being 
of his personages. Yet he is entitled to a high and unique place 
among the Elizabethan dramatists. There is a piercing intelli- 
gence in his grasp of character, a daring vigour and fire in his 
expression. His two plays show no elaborate study of variety of 
character ; but he burns the chief moods of his principal charac- 
ters deep into the mind. 

Vindici, in the " Revenger's Tragedy," forms an interesting 
comparison with Hamlet. His character, one need hardly say, is 
not so versatile and complete as Hamlet's ; but " Hamlet," also, 
is a revenger's tragedy : and it is worth while to look at the two 
side by side. Vindici is sustained throughout in one mood : from 
the first he knows who it is that has robbed him of his mistress, 



358 Shakespeare's successors. 

and he pursues the murderer with unwavering hatred. At no time 
is his spirit filled with weariness of the whole course of the world : 
he lives throughout at a demoniac pitch, turned all to gall and 
wormwood by the bitter wrong done to him, and expatiating on 
the world with daring wit, fierce biting mockery. The critics of 
last generation, in their remarks on the unseasonable levity of 
Hamlet, seemed to have lost sight of the fact that the deepest and 
most wringing sorrow, when it is not too strong for the frame of 
the sufferer, finds vent more in laughter than in tears. Vindici's 
laughter is still more terrible than Hamlet's, because his angry 
bitterness is so unrelaxed and unvaried by gentle moods. Even 
his anger does not pass through many phases. There is no sus- 
tained weight of indignation in it : the intense scoffing vein is 
paramount, and the earnestness of his passion only flashes through 
at fiery intervals. In the scene in which he explains to his brother 
the plan of revenge that he has formed, his fantastic demoniac 
mirth, his bitter buffoonery is at its height ; and the passage is 
one of the many that show how much higher those dramatists 
rose into the extravagances of human passion than sober-footed 
critics have since been able to follow them. Vindici's bride, 
Gloriana, had been ravished and poisoned by the Duke, and Vin- 
dici, the better to effect his revenge, had fiercely forced himself 
to assume the disguise of a pander. In this disguise he had been 
employed by the Duke to procure a mistress, and he explains 
(Act iii.) to his brother with bitter delight who the mistress is 
that he has provided. He keeps the skull of his dead bride in 
his study, and he has resolved to bring this v'eiled to the old 
"luxur" at the appointed spot, and when the deception is dis- 
covered, to consummate his revenge. 

" Enter ViNDlCi with HiPPOLYTO his brother. 

Vind. O sweet, delectable, rare, happy, ravishing ! 
Hipp. Why, what's the matter, brother? 

Vind. O, 'tis able to make a man spring up and knock his 

forehead against yon silver ceiling. 
Hipp. Pr'ythee tell me .... 

Vind. The old Duke . 

Hires me by price to greet him with a lady 
In some fit place, veiled from the eyes of the court. 

I have took care 
For a delicious lip, a sparkling eye ! 
You shall be witness, brother. 
Be ready; stand with your hat off. 

Hipp. Troth I wonder what lady it should be; 
Yet 'tis no wonder, now I think again, 
To have a lady stoop to a Duke. 



CYRIL TOURNEUR. 359 

Enter Vindici with the skull of his love dressed tip in tires. 

Vind. Madam, his grace will not be absent long. 
Secret? Ne'er doubt us, Madam. 'Twill be worth 
Three velvet gowns to your lady;-' ip. . Known? 
Few ladies respect that disgrace ; a poor thin shell ! 
'Tis the best grace you have to do it well. 
I'll save your hand that labour. I'll unmask you. 

Hipp. Why, brother, brother? 

Vind. Art thou beguiled now? 
Have I not fitted the old surfeiter 
With a quaint piece of beauty ? . 

Here's an eye, 
Able to tempt a great man — to serve God. 
A pretty hanging lip, that has forgot now to dissemble. 
Methinks this mouth should make a swearer tremble, 
A drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo them 
To suffer wet damnation to run through them. 
Here's a cheek keeps her colour, let the wind go whistle. 
Spout, rain, we fear thee not : be hot or cold, 
All's one with us. And is not he absurd 
Whose fortunes are upon their faces set, 
That fear no other God but wind and wet. 

Hipp. Brother, you've spoke that right. 
Is this the form that living shone so bright? 

Vind. The very same. 
And now methinks I could e'en chide myself 
For doating on her beauty, though her death 
Shall be avenged after no common action." 

There are many striking passages in Tourneur of splendid 
declamation and masterly description. Perhaps none is more 
remarkable than that quoted by Lamb under the title of " The 
Drowned Soldier." With all one's reverence for Lamb as a critic, 
one cannot help saying that this title and his slightly disparaging 
remark about the weaving of parenthesis within parenthesis shows 
that he did not feel the peculiar and wonderful power of the 
description. It is not the drowned soldier that we are interested 
in : it is the movements of his terrible murderer. I know nothing 
comparable to this passage as a description of the fearfulness of 
the sea : it makes one shudder to read it — as if the gigantic sea- 
serpent himself were hissing and wallowing before us in his uncouth 
and horrible pity. 

" Walking upon the fatal shore. 
Among the slaughtered bodies of their men. 
Which the full-stomached sea had cast upon 
The sands, it was my unhappy chance to light 
Upon a face, whose favour when it lived 
My astonished mind informed me I had seen. 
He lay in his armour, as if that had been 
His coffin ; and the weeping sea (like one 
Whose milder temper doth lament the death 



360 Shakespeare's successors. 

Of him whom in his rage he slew) runs up 
The shore, embraces him, kisses his cheek; 
Goes back again, and forces up the sands 
To bury him; and every time it parts, 
Sheds tears upon him; till at last (as if 
It could no longer endure to see the man 
Whom it had slain, yet loath to leave him) with 
A kind of unresolved unwilling pace, 
Winding her waves one in another (like 
A man that folds his arms, or wrings his hands 
For grief), ebbed from the body, and descends 
As if it \ mid sink down into the earth. 
And hide itself for shame of such a deed." 



IX. — John Ford (15 86-1 640?). 

Whoever wishes to fully understand Ford's genius should read 
Mr Swinburne's paper in the 'Fortnightly Review' of July 1871. 
All other criticisms must appear faint and colourless after that 
masterpiece of searching criticism and noble language. It is still, 
however, open to consider Ford more especially as a dramatist. 
In what follows, my endeavour has been to trace the influence of 
Ford's character on the structure of his plays. 

Little is known of Ford's life. Two doggerel lines that have 
come down in a contemporary satire on the poets of the time are 
rather expressive of what seems to have been the character of the 

man : — 

" Deep in a dump John Ford alone was got. 
With folded arms and melancholy hat." 

He seems to have been a proud, reserved, austere kind of man, of 
few and warm attachments, with but slender gifts in the way of 
ebullient spirits or social flow. He was a barrister, with a respect- 
able ancestry to look back to ; and though he wrote several plays, 
and did not disdain to work in conjunction with such a profes- 
sional playwright as Dekker, he was nervously anxious lest it 
should be supposed that he made his living by play-writing. In 
his first Prologue he spoke contemptuously of such as made poetry 
a trade, and he took more than one opportunity of protesting that 
his plays were the fruits of leisure, the issue of less serious hours. 
Some of his plays he dedicated to noblemen, but he was careful 
to assure them that it was not his habit to court greatness, and 
that his dedication was a simple offering of respect without mer- 
cenary motive. His first play, " The Lover's Melancholy," he 
dedicated to his friends in Gray's Inn, avowing that he desired 
not to please the many, but to obtain the free opinion of his equals 
in condition. 

Ford had good reason for making this independent stand. 



JOHN FORD. 361 

Although Shakespeare had made his Hving chiefly by poetry, and 
had been not very scrupulous in using the fancies and inventions 
of others, there were many traders in play-writing with whom it 
was not so reputable to be classed. The servility of begging 
dedications, too, had become quite loathsome. At the same time, 
the haughty reserved disposition out of which this independence 
came was not favourable to dramatic excellence. A play written 
to please the few is not likely to be a good play. The dramatist 
must be above the narrowness of sympathy that this implies. 
And this ungeniality produces failure where, on first consideration, 
a nineteenth-century reader would least expect it. Such a reader, 
on hearing of an Elizabethan playwright anxious to please the 
few, would expect to find him abstaining from the indecency that 
makes so many of these plays unfit for family reading. But it is 
quite the other way. Ford's low-comedy scenes are very coarse 
and very dull. To be sure, the gentlemen of Gray's Inn, the few 
for whom Ford wrote, were not particular on this point. But this 
was not the main cause of the offensiveness of Ford's attempts at 
humour. The main cause was his want of sympathy with his 
low-comedy puppets. He makes them express themselves as if 
he disliked them and wished to make them odious and contemp- 
tible : their coarseness is unprovoked, gratuitous, with very little 
of wit or humour to redeem it. Fletcher's Megra and other 
creations of that type are quite as gross as Ford's Putana ; but the 
dramatist enters into their obscene humour, and in some degree 
takes away the attention from its obscenity by the cleverness of 
its intrusions, the comical irrepressibility of its chuckle. Now 
P'ord had not sufficient freedom of high spirits to enter into the 
humour of his Putanas and Berghettos, and there is a cynicism, 
a harshness, an offensive exaggeration, in his representation of the 
frankness of their language. 

But the haughty reserve and want of heartiness in Ford's nature 
told against his plays in a much more serious respect. He would 
not seem to have looked at his plays from the point of view of 
his audience, or to have exerted himself to stir their interest or to 
keep it from flagging. There is a certain haughtiness of touch 
even in his language ; sometimes a repudiation of emphasis, as if 
he did not care to be impressive on a slight occasion ; sometimes 
a wilful abstruseness, as if it mattered nothing though his words 
were misunderstood. This alone is often the cause of considerable 
reaches of dull dialogue — dull, that is to say, for the purposes of 
the stage. In his first play, also, " The Lover's Melancholy," 
three acts pass before any very strong interest is excited in the 
personages or the action. The main issues presented to us are — 
what is the cause of the Prince of Cyprus's melancholy, and 
whether he will recover from it. It is hinted that this melancholy 



362 Shakespeare's successors. 

may have dangerous consequences — that discontent is muttering 
at home, and that enemies are gathering on the borders of the 
kingdom, presuming on the inactivity of the prince ; but these 
consequences, instead of being powerfully represented, so as to 
throw the interest of a mixed audience keenly on the prince's 
dejection and indifference to affairs of state, are only dimly and 
faintly mentioned, in such a way that no ordinary hearer would 
perceive their importance. In the underplot we are never agitated 
by any fear of an untoward issue. We never have any serious 
apprehension that the haughty Thaumasta will eventually reject 
Menaphon, or that the noble and prosperous Amethus will falter 
in his love to Cleophila. And the story of the Prince Palador and 
his mistress Eroclea, with its picture of the forlorn Eroclea, and 
its finely wrought presentation of their reunion, is not by itself, 
without further development, enough for a drama : it is better 
suited for a descriptive epic. 

It is only in his two great tragedies, the " Broken Heart " and 
" 'Tis Pity she's a Whore," that P'ord's power is unmistakably 
shown. In them he has to deal, from the first scene, with men 
under the full sway of intelligible passion ; and in the presence of 
passion his haughtiness, his reserve, his indifference, vanishes, and 
he enters earnestly into the work of interpretation. The second 
of these two plays, in spite of the harsh, affected, and offensive 
levity of the title, is Ford's masterpiece, — the play that justifies 
Mr Swinburne's eloquent panegyric, and w^ill always be most in 
the critic's mind in all attempts to fix Ford's place among the 
dramatists. In the " Broken Heart," notwithstanding its many 
powerful and touching passages, there is somewhat too much of 
learned delineation of character : the noble heroism of strength 
and impetuosity in Ithocles and Calantha is too obtrusively bal- 
anced against the tamer heroism of determined endurance in the 
other pair of lovers, Orgilus and Penthea. All the persons of the 
drama have names expressive of their leading qualities ; and at 
the close, our wonder at the strangeness of the lunatic jealousy of 
Bassanes, the pitiless, dogged, irreconcilable revengefulness of 
Orgilus, the bitter constancy of Penthea in starving herself to 
death, seriously obstructs the nobler emotions of horror and pity. 
Even the closing scene, in which the heroic Calantha hears of the 
death of her father and her lover, and gives no sign of sorrow till 
the duties of her high state have been performed, when her over- 
strained heart-strings break, and she falls dead on the body of her 
slain lover, is more likely to stun and amaze all but the select few, 
than to come home powerfully to their sympathies. But there are 
no such scholarly obstructions to the .jrrible tragedy of fate-driven 
love between Brother and Sister. In it passion is supreme from 
the first scene to the last. 



PHILIP MASSINGER. 363 

A man can never wholly hide a ruling tendency in his nature ; 
and even Ford's great tragedies are not without traces of his 
harshness and severity. There is something very unsatisfactory 
in the characters of Bassanes and Vasques : it frets and vexes us 
at the end to see such base deformities stand by and triumph at 
the fall of nobler natures. We may think them unworthy of the 
sword of poetic justice — we may reason them out of the sphere of 
guilt in the tragedy ; but their triumph disconcerts us. 



X. — Philip Massinger (1584- 1640). 

Massinger had less original force than any of the other great 
dramatists. He was eminently a cultivated dramatist, a man of 
broad, liberal, adaptive mind, fluent and versatile, with just con- 
ceptions of dramatic effect, and the power of giving copious ex- 
pression to his conceptions without straining or dislocating effort. 
Yet he was much too strong and vigorous to be a mere imitator. 
His nature was not such as to fight against the influence of his 
great predecessors : his mind opened itself genially to their work, 
and absorbed their materials and their methods ; but he did not 
simply reproduce them — they decomposed, so to speak, in his 
mind, and lay there ready to be laid hold of and embodied in new 
organisms. So far he resembled Shakespeare, in that he had good 
sense enough not to harass himself in straining after little novel- 
ties : his judgment was broad and manly. But he was far from 
resembling Shakespeare in swiftness and originality of imagination : 
his muse was comparatively tame and even-paced. The common 
remark that his diction is singularly free from archaisms shows us 
one aspect of the soundness of his taste, and bears testimony, at 
the same time, to his want of eccentricity and original force. He 
was the Gray of his generation — greater than Gray, inasmuch as 
his generation was greater than Gray's — a man of large, open, 
fertile, and versatile mind. 

His personal career is obscure. His father was " a servant " in 
the family of the Herberts o/ Pembroke, as we know from the 
dedication of his " Bondman," and " spent many years in the 
service of that honourable house ; " but whether the service was 
menial, or such as might be rendered by a gentleman, there is no 
means of ascertaining. At any rate, Massinger's position was not 
such as to prevent him from going to Oxford in 1602, or from 
being in a debtor's prison about 16 14, and under the necessity of 
joining with two others in begging an advance of -£^ from 
Henslowe to procure his release. From the almost desperate 
mendicancy of his dedications, which are the extreme opposites 
of Ford's, one would judge him to have lived in wretched poverty : 



364 Shakespeare's successors. 

and the entry of his death in the register of St Saviour's — "buried 
PhiHp Massinger, a stranger " — gives us no ground for hoping 
against the most natural inference. 

The probabiHty is that Massinger began to write for the stage 
about 1606, if not a year or two earUer, going up from the 
university as Marlowe and Thomas Nash had done some twenty 
years before, in search of literary fame and the mysteries of 
London life. He did not, however, begin to publish till much 
later, his first printed play being "The Virgin Martyr," which 
appeared in 1622, and in which he had the assistance of Dekker. 
Only twelve of his plays were published during his lifetime, out 
of the thirty-seven which he is known to have written. Perhaps 
we have the less reason to regret this, because the plays published 
in his lifetime are decidedly superior to those published after his 
death. He himself saw in print, besides " The Virgin Martyr," — 
"The Duke of Milan," 1623; "The Bondman," 1624; "The 
Roman Actor," 1629 ; " The Picture," 1630 ; " The Fatal Dowry," 
1632 ; "The Maid of Honour," 1632 ; "A New Way to Pay Old 
Debts," 1633 ; and "The Great Duke of Florence," 1636. After 
all, it may be that Mr Warburton's cook, who is said to have 
covered his pies and lighted his fires with some twelve of 
Massinger's plays, may have done both the world and the poet 
a service. 

Gifford entertained the notion that Massinger must have turned 
Roman Catholic when he was at Oxford. The notion is based 
upon the use that Massinger makes of a Roman Catholic legend 
in "The Virgin Martyr," and the fair character that he gives to a 
Jesuit priest in " The Renegado." One wants proof more relative : 
this only proves that Massinger was able to treat Roman Catholics 
with dramatic impartiality.^ Coleridge's notion about Massinger's 
democratic leanings is equally questionable. Massinger, indeed, 
makes one of his characters sigh for the happy times when lords 
were styled fathers of fiimilies. He makes another say that princes 
do well to cherish goodness where they find it, for — 

" They being men and not gods, Contarino, 
They can give wealth and titles, but not virtues." 

He makes Timoleon administer a sharp rebuke to the men of 
Syracuse for corruption prevailing in high places, and rate them 
soundly for preferring golden dross to liberty. 

In the same play ("The Bondman"), he takes an evident 
pleasure in representing the indignities put upon high-fed madams 
by their insurgent slaves : and in " The City Madam " he ridicules 
with much zest the pretensions of upstart wealth. But all these 

1 But see article on Massinger in ' Encyclopaedia Britannica.' 



PHILIP MASSINGER. 365 

things are as consistent with a benevolent paternal Toryism as with 
Whiggery, and are to be looked upon as indications simply of the 
dramatist's range of sympathies, and not of any discontent on his 
part with the established framework of government or society. 

Hartley Coleridge, in his rambling and racy introduction to 
Massinger and Ford, commits himself to the extraordinary state- 
ment that Massinger had no humour. " Massinger would have 
been the dullest of jokers, if Ford had not contrived to be still 
duller." I have already remarked on the severity and ungeniality 
of Ford's character; but there is nothing connected with Mas- 
singer to imply that he bore the least resemblance to Ford in this 
point. On the contrary, all Massinger's characteristics are tliose 
of a widely sympathetic man, with a genial propensity to laughter. 
He has written several very obscene passages, such as the court- 
ship of Asotus by Corisca in "The Bondman," but they are all 
pervaded by genuine humour ; and a countless number of his 
scenes, such as that between Wellborn and Marrall in "A New 
Way to Pay Old Debts," are irresistibly laughable. It may per- 
haps be said with justice that there is often a certain serious 
motive underlying Massinger's humour, which connects itself with 
the earnestness of his distressed life ; but humour he undoubt- 
edly had, and that of the most ebullient and irrepressible sort. 

One fancies indeed, but it may be the result of our knowledge 
of his painful life, that there is a certain sad didactic running 
through all Massinger's work. The " Duke of Milan," by far his 
greatest drama, has not the satisfying close of Shakespeare's 
tragedies. It preaches directly the moral deducible from " Romeo 
and Juliet," that violent delights have violent ends ; but whereas 
we do not vex ourselves with vain wishes that Romeo and Juliet 
had l)een united in happy marriage, we are at the death of Sforza 
and Marcelia disconcerted by the feeling that their fate ought to 
have been, and easily might have been, different. And in his 
other tragedies we are haunted at the close by a similar uneasi- 
ness : the purgation of the mind by pity and terror is not effected 
— the tumult that they raise is not tranquillised. All tragedies, 
of course, are susceptible of a didactic interpretation ; but those 
in which the didactic has a sharp edge, affect us in quite a different 
way from those in which it is vaguely present as part of a grand 
and overwhelming impression ; and Massinger's conclusions have 
a sharp edge. Again, his romantic tragi-comedies,. and even his 
comedies, have also a serious tinge, apart from the natural interest 
of the development of the story. They do not directly preach at 
us, but the colour of the subject-matter suggests that the dramatist 
was not wholly free-minded and studious only of dramatic and 
scenic impressions. 



366 Shakespeare's successors. 

XL — James Shirley (1596-166 7). 

More is known about Shirley than about some of his more dis- 
tinguished, or at least abler contemporaries. He was born in 
London, and educated at Merchant Tailors' School, St John's 
College, Oxford, and Catherine Hall, Cambridge. He took orders, 
and was presented to a living in Hertfordshire ; but in a short time 
he became Roman Catholic, left his living, turned schoolmaster for 
a while ; and at last, finding this employment also " uneasy to him, 
he retired to the metropolis, hved in Gray's Inn, and set up for 
a playmaker." He was twenty-eight or twenty-nine when he 
went up to London (probably in 1624 or 1625), and in the course 
of a few years he got into the full swing of dramatic composition, 
and produced plays at the rate of two or three or four a-year. 
The chief were — " Love's Tricks," a comedy, 1625 ; " The Maid's 
Revenge," a tragedy, 1626; "The Brothers," a comedy, 1626; 
''The Witty Fair One," a comedy, 1628; "The Wedding," a 
comedy, 1628; "The Grateful Servant," a tragi-comedy, 1629; 
"The Changes, or Love in a Maze," 1632 ; "The Ball" (written 
in conjunction with Chapman, but almost wholly Shirley's), 1632 ; 
"The Gamester," a comedy, 1633; "The Example" (containing 
an imitation of Ben Jonson's humours^, 1634; "The Oppor- 
tunity," 1634 ; "The Traitor," a tragedy (perhaps Shirley's best), 
1635 'y "The Lady of Pleasure " (perhaps the best of his comedies), 
1635; "The Cardinal," a tragedy (an attempt to compete with 
Webster's " Duchess of Malfi"), 1641. Under the Commonwealth, 
Shirley, after some vicissitudes during the civil war, was obliged to 
return to his old trade of teaching ; and at the Restoration, though 
several of his plays were revived, he made no attempt to resume 
his connection with the stage. 

Shirley's first essay in print was a poem entitled " Echo " (after- 
wards printed under the more suggestive tide of "Narcissus"). 
A man's youthful work is always a good index of his tendencies 
and powers, and in this poem the nature of Shirley's gifts shines 
unmistakably through the lines. He goes boldly to work with 
jaunty self-assured ease : there is pith and " go " in his style ; he 
is borne on with pride in his triumphs of expression, but he is 
victorious with weapons which other men have provided. He has 
no originality of idea, or situation, or diction. 

The same thing strikes us in his plays. Lamb says of him that 
" he was the last of a great race, all of whom spoke nearly the 
same language, and had a set of moral feelings and notions in 
common." But the really great men of the race, not merely 
Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher, but Chapman, Dekker, Web- 
ster, Ford, and Massinger, spoke the same language with a differ- 
ence ; and each had moral feelings and notions of his own. In 



JAMES SHIRLEY. 36/ 

Shirley the distinctive individual difference was small, both in 
amount and in kind : he was not a great man in himself, but an 
essentially small man inspired by the creations of great men. 
Fletcher was his master and exemplar, as Shakespeare was Mas- 
singer's ; but he imitated much more closely, was much more 
completely carried away by this model than Massinger was. And 
although his language and moral feelings and notions (even as 
regards female types and kings) are Fletcher's, and he had most 
ambition to emulate Fletcher's dashing and brilliant manner, yet 
Shirley's plays contain frequent echoes of other dramatists. One 
great interest in reading him is that he reminds us so often of the 
situations and characters of his predecessors. It is good for the 
critic, if for nobody else, to read Shirley, because there he finds 
emphasised all that told most effectively on the playgoers of the 
period. We read Greene and Marlowe to know what the Eliza- 
bethan drama was in its powerful but awkward youth ; Shirley to 
know what it was in its declining but facile and still powerful old 
age. 

There were many other able playmakers in the great dramatic 
period, and notably four Thomases, Thomas Heywood, Thomas 
Rowley, Thomas Randolph, and Thomas May, but no other that 
can be called great, either by originality or by imitation. True, 
Charles Lamb has called Thomas Heywood " a prose Shake- 
speare," and that prolific author of 250 plays doubtless has a 
certain sweet vein of grandmotherly tenderness in him ; but if 
Elia had lived till now, he would, perhaps, have described good old 
Heywood more accurately by calling him a garrulous Longfellow. 

One may hope to be excused for feeling no desire to go farther 
down the scale than Middleton and Shirley. In studying the 
literature that led to the supreme efflorescence of the Elizabethan 
drama, one thinks no relic too humble to be worth discussing ; 
but when so many large and powerful minds invite our com- 
panionship, and continue always to lay before us fresh points of 
interest and fresh matter for thought, it is intolerably dull to turn 
from them to the crowd of mediocrities who hang about their 
doors and follow their footsteps. 



APPENDIX A. 



OUR PLEASANT WILLY. 

Three stanzas are often quoted from Thalia's complaint regarding 
the decay of the theatres in Spenser's " Tears of the Muses," and it 
has been elaborately argued that they refer to Shakespeare. The date 
of their publication is 1591. 

"And he, the man whom Nature's self had made 
To mock herself, and truth to imitate, 
With kindly counter under mimic shade, 

Our pleasant Willy, ah ! is dead of late ; 
With whom all joy and jolly merriment 
Is also deaded, and in dolour drent. 

Instead thereof scoffing Scurrility, 
And scornful Folly with Contempt is crept, 

Rolling in rhymes of shameless ribaldry 
Without regard or due decorum kept ; 

Each idle wit at will presumes to make. 

And doth the learned's task upon him take. 

But that same gentle spirit from whose pen 
Large streams of honey and sweet nectar flow, 

Scorning the boldness of such base-born men, 
Which dare their follies forth so rashly throw ; 

Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell. 

Than so himself to mockery to sell." 

I have stated some reasons (p. 263) for refusing to believe that these 
stanzas, however appropriate to Shakespeare we may think them, can 
possibly have been applied to him in 159 1. I believe that death is, in 
the first stanza, real and not metaphorical, and that Willy is Spenser's 
friend Sidney. Sidney's death is lamented under that name in an 
eclogue in Davidson's Poetical Rhapsody — "an eclogue made long 
since upon the death of Sir Philip Sidney." 

" Ye shepherds' boys that lead your flocks. 
The whilst your sheep feed safely round about. 
Break me your pipes that pleasant sound did yield, 
Sing now no more the songs of Colin Clout : 



"OUR PLEASANT WILLY." 369 

Lament the end of all our joy, 
Lament the source of all annoy; 
Willy is dead 
That wont to lead 
Our flocks and us in mirth and shepherds' glee : 
Well could he sing, 
Well dance and spring ; 
Of all the shepherds was none such as he. 

How often hath his skill in pleasant song 
Drawn all the water-nymphs from out their bowers? 
How have they lain the tender grass along. 
And made him garlands gay of smelling flowers? 
Phoebus himself that conquer'd Pan, 
Striving with Willy nothing wan ; 

Methinks I see 

The time when he 
Pluckt from his golden locks the laurel crown ; 

And so to raise 

Our Willy's praise, 
Bedeckt his head and softly set him down. 

The learned Muses flockt to hear his skill. 
And quite forgot their water, wood, and mount; 
They thought his songs were done too quickly still. 
Of none but Willy's pipe they made account.' 
He sung ; they seem'd in joy to flow : 
He ceast; they seem'd to weep for woe ; 

The rural rout 

All round about 
Like bees came swarming thick to hear him sing ; 

Ne could they think 

On meat or drink 
While Willy's music in their ears did ring. 

But now, alas! such pleasant mirth is past; 
Apollo weeps, the Muses rend their hair. 
No joy on earth that any time can last. 
See where his breathless corpse lies on the bier. 
That self-same hand that reft his life 
Hath turned shepherd's peace to strife. 

Our joy is fled, 

Our life is dead, 
Our hope, our help, our glory, all is gone : 

Our poet's praise. 

Our happy days. 
And nothing left but grief to think thereon." 

The only difficulty in the way of supposing our pleasant Willy to be 
Sir Philip Sidney is purely factitious. ^ It is taken for granted that all 
the three of Spenser's stanzas refer to the same person as the first ; 
and then it is argued that the death of our pleasant Willy must be only 
metaphorical in the first, meaning really his cessation from the com- 
position of comedies, because in the third he is said to be producing 
large streams of tragedies. But any person who looks at the whole 
lament will see that two different persons must be intended. The 

1 The fact that Sidney did not write comedies, if we exclude his " Lady of the 
May " from that title, is immaterial. The poet only says that Nature had made 
him to write comedies — " to mock herself with kindly counter under mimic 
shade." 



370 APPENDIX A. 

sequence of thought is this : The first of the three stanzas laments that 
Willy is dead; the second, that scoffing scurrility and scornful folly 
have occupied the stage in his stead ; the third approves the conduct 
of a living and producing writer in abstaining from co-operation with 
base-born play-wrights. If we suppose "that same gentle spirit" to 
refer back to our pleasant Willy, and not forward to the next line, we 
land ourselves in a contradiction whether we regard Willy''s death as 
literal or metaphorical, because this gentle spirit is both really and 
poetically alive — large streams of honey and nectar are flowing from 
him. I believe that in the third stanza Thalia refers to Spenser him- 
self, and that here we have his justification of himself for complain- 
ing of the withdrawal of learning from the stage, and yet sending no 
compositions of his own to prop it up. Some such justification was 
certainly required : Spenser could hardly have asked why learning had 
forsaken the stage, without giving a reason for withholding contributions 
from his own copious pen. The vanity of the excuse will not surprise 
any one who knows what he makes Hobinol and others say concerning 
Colin Clout. 



APPENDIX B. 



AN UNRECOGNISED SONNET BY SHAKESPEARE? 

In the Elizabethan age of our literature, when there were neither 
dailies, weeklies, monthlies, nor quarterlies in which it might be possi- 
ble to express a friendly partiality for a new book, it was a common 
mark of friendship to send to an author a set of eulogistic verses, to be 
printed at the beginning of his book as a guarantee of its worth. In 
those days very few books were published without one or more such 
introductory poems of commendation. It was, perhaps, inevitable 
that this peculiar form of literature should, even in the rich Elizabethan 
age, be remarkable chiefly for poverty of invention ; the circle of ideas 
for these commendations is almost necessarily limited. We find in 
great plenty such verses as the following : — 



or 



or- 



He that shall read thy characters, Nic. Breton, 

And weigh them well, must say they are well written; 

Who reads this book with a judicious eye, 
Will in true judgment true discretion try ; 

Read with regard what here with due regard 
Our second Ciceronian Southwell sent. 



Such is the commonplace commendatory poem ; and the friendly 
eulogiums of the greatest masters, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, 
Chapman, or Ford, rise very little, if at all, above the level. Most of 
them are of the three-piled hyperbolical order — containing loud asser- 
tions of merit with loud defiance of contradiction, and playing if possi- 
ble upon the name of the piece or of the author. Even Chapman^s 
ingenuity could devise nothing better than the following lines in a 
eulogium on Ben Jonson's " Volpone, or The Fox" : 

Come yet more forth, Volpone, and thy chase 
Perform to all length, for thy breath will serve thee; 
The usurer shall never wear thy case, 
Men do not hunt to kill but to preserve thee. 



372 APPENDIX B. 

A very fair impression of the general character of commendatory 
verses may be got from the following set composed by Henry Upcher 
for Greene's '-Menaphon": in cleverness and prettiness this is dis- 
tinctly above the average : — 

Delicious words, the life of wanton wit, 

That doth inspire our souls with sweet content, 
Why hath your father Hermes thought it fit, 

Mine eyes should surfeit by my heart's consent? 
Full twenty summers have I fading seen, 

And twenty Floras in their golden guise ; 
Yet never viewed I such a pleasant Greene, 

As this whose garnish'd gleads, compar'd, devise. 
Of all the flowers a Lilly once 1 loved, 

Whose labouring beauty branch'd itself abroad ; 
But now old age his glory hath remov'd, 

And greener objects are mine eyes abroad. 
No country to the downs of Arcadie, 

Where Aganippe's ever-springing wells 
Do moist the meads with bubbling melody. 

And makes me muse what more in Delos dwells. 
There feeds our Menaphon s celestial Muse, 

There makes his pipe his pastoral report; 
Which strained now a note above his use, 

Foretells he'll ne'er come chaunt of Thoae's sport. 
Read all that list, and read till you mislike. 

Condemn who can, so envy be not judge ; 
No, read who can, swell higher, lest it shriek, 

Robin^ thou hast done well, care not who grudge. 

It has been remarked that Shakespeare is not known to have con- 
tributed any such expression of goodwill to the works of any of his 
friends, and the reason has been supposed to be that he shrank from 
the suspicion of hollowness and insincerity to which the practice had 
become liable. But I am half inclined to believe that I have fallen 
upon an exception to this rule, made, in fact, before the rule was 
formed, a few years after Shakespeare's arrival in London. There is 
a sonnet prefixed to John Florio's ' Second Fruits,' published in the 
spring of 1591, which is not without certain marks of Shakespearian 
parentage. ' Second Fruits' is not, \)tx\\3c^s, prima facie, a book where 
one would naturally expect to find a recommendation by Shakespeare ; 
being nothing but a book of dialogues and aphorisms, printed in 
parallel columns of English and Italian, to help those speaking the one 
language to acquire a knowledge of the other. But those who remem- 
ber the interest then taken in the Italian language, the probability 
that Shakespeare shared that interest, and the fact that both Shake- 
speare and Florio, who was a famed teacher of Italian, were proteges of 
the young Earl of Southampton, will not be inclined to deny the 
authorship on external probabilities, if the sonnet seems otherwise 
worthy of so distinguished an origin. It runs as follows, the compli- 
ment turning upon the title " Fruits," the name Florio, and the season 
of publication : — 



AN UNRECOGNISED SONNET BY SHAKESPEARE ? 373 



Phaeton to his friend Florio, 

Sweet friend, whose name agrees with thy increase, 

How fit a rival art thou of the spring ! 

For when each branch hath left his flourishing. 
And green-lock'd Summer's shady pleasures cease, 
She makes the Winter's storms repose in peace 

And spends her franchise on each living thing : 

The daisies sprout, the little birds do sing; 
Herbs, gums, and plants do vaunt of their release. 
So when that all our English wits lay dead 

(Except the Laurel that is ever green), 
Thou with thy fruits our barrenness o'erspread 

And set thy flowery pleasance to be seen. 
Such fruits, such flow'rets of morality. 
Were ne'er before brought out of Italy. 

The concluding couplet is bald, apparently from the necessity that 
the author was under of returning from his description of the seasons 
to the dry reality in hand ; but otherwise, those familiar with the com- 
mendatory verses of the period will recognise at once its superiority to 
commonplace. Excepting always the splendid sonnet signed " W. R.,'' 
prefixed to the second issue of Spenser's ' Faery Queen,' which is so 
good that it is hard to resist a conviction that it is Spenser's own, one 
might safely challenge all detractors to produce half-a-dozen better 
commendatory poems from the works of that generation. Whereas 
most others strike us as making desperate efforts to find something to 
say, Phaeton seems to hit easily upon a fresh and fruitful idea. He is 
hyperbolical, of course, in his praise, but his hyperbole is not three- 
piled ; on the contrary, there is a peculiar earnestness and simplicity 
in his tone. This is all the more noticeable because the main idea 
would seem to have been suggested by one of the sonnets of Petrarch, 
which professes to have been sent with a present of flowers in the 
spring. There is no imitation beyond the borrowing of the main 
thought : Phaeton follows it out in his own way. It is no exaggeration 
to say that almost any other Panegyrist in that age would have played 
upon the words " Florio" and " Fruits" from beginning to end of the 
sonnet. 

Nothing is more distinctive of Shakespeare than the intense earn- 
estness of his descriptions of the coming on of Winter and of Night, 
corresponding naturally to the genuine ecstasy of his descriptions of 
Spring and Morning. This is no idolatrous fancy about Shakespeare, 
but a conclusion that is irresistible when we place his descriptions 
side by side with the descriptions of his contemporaries. It is not 
easy to analyse the peculiarities of expression that produce this effect 
in terms impervious to cavil ; but one may venture to say that in 
their descriptions of Winter and Spring, or of the allied seasons, 
Night and Morning, his contemporaries are quainter, or more diffuse, 
or more frivolous, or more conventional, than he is. Shakespeare 
does not use the conventional classical personifications in his less seriouj 
moods ; but much more habitually than his contemporaries he per' 
sonifies the powers of Nature directly for himself. Thus whf" 
Spenser has — 



374 APPENDIX B. 



At last fair Hesperus in highest sky 

Had spent his lamp and brought forth dawning light, 



Shakespeare has — 



Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund Day 
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. 

Where Spenser has — 

The joyous day 'gan early to appear, 

And fair Aurora, fro the dewy bed 

Of aged Tithon 'gan herself to rear 

With rosy cheeks, for shame as blushing red, — 

Shakespeare has the incomparable lines — 

And sullen Night with slow sad steps descended 
To ugly hell ; when lo ! the blushing Morrow 
Lends light to all fair eyes that light will borrow. 

Take, again, Drayton's description of the morning twilight — 

Now ere the purple dawning yet did spring. 
The joyful lark began to stretch her wing ; 
And now the cock, the morning's trumpeter, 
Play'd " Hunt's-up " for the day star to appear : 
Down slideth Phoebe from her crystal chair, 
'Sdaining to lend her light unto the air. 

This is very sweet and pretty, but it wants the glowing earnestness 
of Shakespeare"'s description of a somewhat later moment — 

Lo ! now the gentle lark, weary of rest. 

From his moist cabinet mounts up on high, 

And wakes the Morning, from whose silver breast 

The Sun ariseth in his Majesty : 

Who doth the world so gloriously behold 

That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold. 

In all Shakespeare's descriptions we are conscious of a deep and 
vivid sense of the pains of darkness and barrenness, and the pleasures 
of relief from them. And in the sonnet of Phaeton's, though the 
occasion did not call for the deepest feeling, and though the expression 
is not so uniformly mature, we are conscious of the same genuine 
earnestness. Phaeton also personifies directly, and gives to his per- 
sonification of Spring a fuller and less conventional life than we have 
seen in any other Elizabethan poet. The reader will best understand 
our argument by comparing Phaeton's treatment of the Seasons with 
the following passages from Drayton : — 

As when fair Ver, dight in her flowery rail, 
In her new-colour'd livery decks the earth : 
And glorious Titan spreads his sunshine veil, 
To bring to pass her tender infants' birth : 
Such was her beauty which I then possest. 
With whose embracings all my youth was blest. 



AN UNRECOGNISED SONNET BY SHAKESPEARE ? 375 

As in September, when our year resigns 

The glorious sun unto the watery signs, 

Which through the clouds looks on the earth in scorn, 

The little bird yet to salute the morn 

Upon the naked branches sets her foot 

(The leaves now lying on the mossy root). 

And there a silly chirruping doth keep. 

As though she fain would sing, yet fain would weep : 

Praising fair Summer, that too soon is gone, 

Or mourning Winter too fast coming on ; 

In this sad plight I mourn for thy return. 

When we compare more minutely the diction of Phaeton's sonnet 
with the language used by Shakespeare in his plays and his sonnets 
regarding the Seasons, some very curious coincidences are brought to 
light. The word " franchise," which occurs in Phaeton's sonnet, has 
a curious history in Shakespeare's early plays. This fine-sounding 
word and its compounds, which Dryden thought worthy of his "majes- 
tic march and energy divine," was not by any means common among 
the Elizabethan writers : Spenser does not use it in the first three 
books of his ' Faery Queen,' though he has plenty of opportunities. 
But it was a very favourite word with Shakespeare in his early days. 
He uses "enfranchise" in the sense of setting at liberty in "Titus 
Andronicus," in the " Two Gentlemen of Verona," in " Richard III.," 
twice in "Richard II.," and in "Venus and Adonis" — all written, 
according to Malone, before 1593. He seems then to have felt that 
he had rather overdone the figure; for, in "Love's Labour's Lost" 
(supposed to be his next play), he puts it into the mouth of Don Adriano 
de Armado — "Sirrah Costard, I will enfranchise thee;" and after 
having thus, with characteristic self-irony, laughed at his own fine- 
sounding term, he thenceforth uses it more in a political and technical 
sense, as in " Coriolanus" and in "Antony and Cleopatra." 

But it would be idle to found any identification upon single words. 
What any person ought to do who is disposed to discuss, if not to 
believe in, the identity of Phaeton and Shakespeare, is to examine 
minutely Shakespeare's conceptions of the Seasons, together with 
the words and images he uses in expressing them. If one finds in 
Shakespeare the peculiar circle of ideas and diction which appear in 
Phaeton's sonnet, and the same circle cannot be shown to exist in any 
other Elizabethan poet, then one is entitled to claim a presumption, 
though far from a certainty, in favour of the identity of Phaeton with 
Shakespeare. This circle of expressions, and not any single expression, 
must be made the basis of the argument. 

Let us look, then, at Shakespeare's sonnets, where, as in his earlier 
plays, the Seasons frequently occur. In the opening sonnets, as our 
readers remember, Shakespeare urges his friend to preserve his beauty 
to another generation, warning him of the rapid and inevitable progress 
of decay. In the fifth sonnet he says : — 

For never-resting Time leads Summer on 
To hideous Winter, and confounds him there ; 

Sap check'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone 
Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness everywhere ; 

Then, were not summer's distillation left, 
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass, 



3/6 APPENDIX B. 

Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft, 
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was. 
But flowers distill'd, though they with Winter meet, 
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet. 

Here the idea of the vital principles, the germs, of natural things 
kept alive throughout the Winter as ' ' liquid priso)iers^'''^ corresponds 
exactly with Phaeton^s idea of Spring spending her franchise on each 
living thing, and with the idea of natural things vaunting of their 
release. The ideas are, as it were, segments of the same circle. And 
looking at the words used to express them, it may be noticed that 
" imprisonment" and " enfranchisement" occur as obverse expressions 
of the same idea in one of Shakespeare's earliest plays — "Titus 
Andronicus," iv. 2, 124 — 

And from that womb where you imprison d were 
He is enfranchised and come to light. 

They occur also in the same connection in one of his latest plays — the 
"Winter's Tale," ii. 2, 60 — 

This child was prisoner to the womb, and is 
By law and process of great Nature thence 
Freed and enfranchised. 

The idea of Summer's distillation as a liquid prisoner during Winter 
is a carrying out and completing of the less recondite idea of Spring 
as an enfranchising power. Simple as the conception may seem, the 
present writer has met neither the one expression nor the other among 
all the numerous descriptions of Spring by other Elizabethan writers ; 
and it seems to him to have the peculiar vividness and depth that are 
characteristic of Shakespeare's conception of the seasons of \\'inter and 
Spring. Can any more patient and learned student of Elizabethan 
poetry produce the same conception from any of Shakespeare's con- 
temporaries ? 

In Sonnet XII. we find the following picture of the mournful time of 
the year : — 

, When lofty trees I see barren of leaves, 

Which erst from heat did canopy the herd. 
And Summer's green all girded up in sheaves, 
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard. 

The aspects here presented correspond very closely with the aspects in 
Phaeton's sonnet, the succinct "shady pleasures" being represented 
by a whole line ; but there is nothing very distinctive in the expression, 
and one would not build upon that. What one does to some extent 
build upon, is the association of death (" borne on the bier'''') and bare- 
ness, as in Phaeton's sonnet, with the approach of the season of 
Winter. The same association appears in Sonnet XIII. (where also 
there is a condensation of impressions similar to the condensation 
in " green-lock'd Summer's shady pleasures," and peculiarly Shake- 
spearian) : — 

Which husbandry in honour might uphold 

Against the stormy gusts of Winter's day, 

And barren rage of death's eternal cold. 



AN UNRECOGNISED SONNET BY SHAKESPEARE ? 377 

Again, in Shakespeare's 98th Sonnet, we find the following descrip- 
tion of the reviving influence of Spring : — 

From you have I been absent in the spring, 

When proud-pied April, dress'd in all his trim, 

Hath put a spirit of youth in everything. 

That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him. . 

The mood here is lighter, more ebullient, than in Phaeton, as becomes 
the occasion, and harmonises with the playful treatment of the grim 
classical personage : but the italicised line has a certain correspondence 
in form with Phaeton's — "-And spends lier franchise on each living 
thing;''"' and the epithet "proud-pied" corresponds both in form and 
in position with " green-lock'd." Apart, however, from this, let the 
reader note from the two passages Shakespeare's association of a 
vaunting youthfid spirit with Spring, and then turn to the play of 
" Richard II.," act i. scene 3. Young Bolingbroke and Mowbray have 
quarrelled mortally, and the lists have been set up at Coventry before 
the King and his nobles that they may fight their quarrel to the death. 
In the course of the preliminary formalities Bolingbroke expresses his 
confidence in the issue, and vaunts in his youthful sap, saying that 
he is — 

Not sick, although I have to do with death, 

But lusty, young, and cheerly drawing breath. 

He invokes the blessing of his father upon his arms — 

O thou, the earthly author of my blood, 

VJhose yozithful spirit, in me regenerate, 

Doth with a twofold vigour lift me up 

To reach a victory above my head. 

Add proof unto mine armour with thy prayers. 

Gaunt, in answer to this, bids him "rouse up his youthful blood." 
Shakespeare has now to find for Mowbray a suitable balance to this 
vaunting. He wishes to make Mowbray express in turn how delighted 
he is at the prospect of the encounter. When Marlowe in " Edward 
II." had to make Gaveston express intense delight at his return from 
banishment, he used the following image : — 

The shepherd nipt with biting Winter's rage 
Frolics not more to see the painted Spring 
Than I do to behold your Majesty. 

Now the form used by Shakespeare in the following lines to express 
Mowbray's exultation is so similar to this passage in Marlowe, with 
which Shakespeare must have been familiar, that it almost looks as if 
this had been in his mind when he wrote them ; and if so, the associa- 
tion between Spring and enfranchisement had occurred to him directly, 
as it had to Phaeton : — 

However God or fortune cast my lot, 

There lives or dies, true to King Richard's throne, 

A loyal, just, and upright gentleman. 

Never did captive with a freer heart 



3/8 APPENDIX B. 

Cast off his chains of bondage and embrace 
His golden uncontroll' d enfranchisement. 
More than my dancing soul doth celebrate 
This feast of battle with mine adversary. 

The pride of the youthful spirit, the "gleeful boast" of everything 
in the Spring, and the sense of newly acquired freedom as expressed 
by the word enfranchisement, would seem to have been in Shake- 
speare\s mind parts of one circle of ideas and expressions. The same 
association of youthful spirit and enfranchisement appears in his de- 
scription of Adonis's horse — 

But when he saw his love, \\\% yontK s fair fee, 
He held such petty bondage in disdain ; 
Throwing the base thong from his bending crest, 
Enfra?ichisif7g his mouth, his back, his breast. 

Can this same definite circle of words and ideas be pointed out in 
any other Elizabethan writer? If not, is there not some probability 
that Shakespeare and Phaeton are the same? While Shakespeare 
makes the Spring " put a spirit of youth in every thing,'' Phaeton makes 
the Spring " spend her franchise on each living thing " ; but Shake- 
speare twice uses youthful spirit and enfranchisement as allied words 
and ideas, and twice describes birth as an enfranchisement. More- 
over, Shakespeare speaks of the child as being imprisoned before its 
birth, and of natural things as being imprisoned before their birth in 
the Spring-time. The word " vaunt " is so common that we should not 
care to lay any stress upon its being used both by Shakespeare and by 
Phaeton to express the personified feelings of the Spring. One thing, 
however, we may remark as characteristic of Shakespeare. Phaeton 
does not use the word in the same conventional meaningless way as 
" Summer's pride,'''' or "Spring's proud livery": he carries the figure 
a little deeper, gives it a meaning and a new life by suggesting why 
things vaunt in the Spring-time — they " vaiait of their release " from 
the tyranny of Winter. 

Such an identification, of course, does not admit of demonstrative 
proof: all that we can possibly provide in the absence of authentic 
contemporary testimony that Shakespeare and Phaeton were the same, 
is a concurrence of presumptions, separately feeble, severally open 
to banter, but together affording as firm a ground for belief as can be 
had in such matters. I fear the attempt to trace the movements 
of Shakespeare's mind may be regarded as supersubtle ; but I cannot 
refrain from noting another small coincidence. In the "Two Gen- 
tlemen of Verona," written, according to Malone, in the same year 
as the sonnet, the word "enfranchise" occurs in curious proximity 
to "Phaethon." When the Duke (iii. i) detects Valentine in a design 
to carry away Silvia, and takes a sonnet from the lover's person, he 
cries — 

What's here ? 

' Silvia, this night I will enfranchise thee.' 
'Tis so : and here's the ladder for the purpose. 
Why, Phaethon, — for thou art Merops' son, — 
Wilt thou aspire to guide the heavenly car, 
And with thy daring folly burn the world. 



AN UNRECOGNISED SONNET BY SHAKESPEARE ? 379 

Now there is not a very strong similarity between tlie situation of 
Phaethon and the situation of a young man about to elope with his 
mistress — at least not enough for the one directly to suggest the 
other. The elopement of the Duke's daughter with Valentine was 
not likely to set the world on fire. If, however, Shakespeare wrote 
Phaeton's sonnet, the marked word "enfranchise," which was evi- 
dently a sweet morsel to his mouth, would naturally suggest the 
sonnet ; and the faint resemblance between Valentine and Phaethon 
would flash upon his mind when the idea of Phaethon's ambition had 
been suggested by this accidental reminder ! I need hardly say that 
the coincidence may be purely accidental, and that the ambition of 
Valentine in "reaching at stars because they shone over him," may 
have been quite enough to suggest the ambition of Phaethon. 

So much for the correspondence of the words and substance of 
Phaeton's imagery with the Shakespearian circle. The rest of the 
sonnet offers less field for telling correspondence : every poet in those 
days played upon names, every poet admired Spenser, and every 
poet was interested in what came out of Italy. Shakespeare indulged 
in all sorts of puns upon names, serious and sportive ; he admired 
Spenser, as appears from traces of Spenser's influence, even if we 
reject the open compliment in the disputed "Passionate Pilgrim"; 
and the beginning of act i. of the "Taming of the Shrew" shows 
that his thoughts had turned to Italy as the nursery of arts (although 
a passage in " Richard II." shows that he had no liking for the slavish 
imitation of Italian manners). But in these respects he stood by no 
means alone. In Phaeton's manner, however, of playing upon the 
name there is something Shakesperian, if not peculiarly and dis- 
tinctively so. The reader will have noticed that both in Harry 
Upcher's verses and in Chapman's, the puns upon the names are 
introduced indirectly : we are not expressly informed that the names 
are susceptible of such and such an interpretation, but the pun is 
made, and we are left to see it for ourselves. I have looked over a 
good number of these sonnets and verses, and find the same thing 
in them all. But in Phaeton's sonnet it is different. Here there is 
no pun at all in the strict sense of the word, there is merely a serious 
abstract statement — "whose name agrees with thy increase." Now 
this form occurs several times in Shakespeare. In "Richard II.," 
when the king asks, "How is't with aged Gaunt?" the sick old man 
answers — 

O, how that name befits my composition ! 

In " Cymbeline," when Imogen tells Lucius that her name is Fidele, 
he answers — 

Thou dost approve thyself the very same; 

Thy name fits well thy faith, thy faith thy name. 

In both these cases the form of the expression corresponds as closely 
as possible with Phaeton's ; and simple as the form may appear, and 
though it might in the present day be paralleled from Bret Harte, I 
have not found the same form in any Elizabethan except Shakespeare. 

If it proved anything, one might go through Phaeton's sonnet word 
by word, as well as line by line, and point out that the cardinal verbs 
occur in Shakespeare in similar situations. "Agrees with," "left" 



380 APPENDIX B. 

(for left off'), " spends," " set," and words cognate to them, are to be 
found in exactly parallel situations. But, although I have a general 
impression that these four constructions are not so common in other 
Elizabethans as in Shakespeare, one does not pretend to the super- 
human reading that would entitle one to affirm that proposition 
absolutely and dogmatically. I therefore only suggest, with all 
willingness to accept demonstrated correction, whether it is not the 
case. 

An obvious objection might be raised on the form of Phaeton's 
sonnet. It is not composed like Shakespeare's in the form of three 
quatrains and a couplet, but consists of an eight-line stave and a six- 
line stave. This objection is met by pointing to the date, 1591. The 
form ultimately adopted by Shakespeare was established in England 
by Daniel and Drayton in 1592 and 1594. Sidney, who set the 
fashion of sonnet-writing at the time, followed the Italian model, as 
Phaeton does. 

Finally — I put this argument last, though it was the first to strike 
me — attentive readers of poetry must have remarked that the effort 
of fully realizing what they read differs for different poets. In all poets 
we may encounter passages of special difficulty ; but, on the whole, 
each poet keeps us at a particular intellectual strain. This is deter- 
mined chiefly by the degree of abstractness or abstruseness in the 
language, and by the degree of clearness and power in the ideas. 
Shakespeare's language is peculiarly abstract, but his ideas are clear 
and definite : as we read, we are baffled by the abstractness, but 
stimulated by the clearness and power : once excited and braced up 
to the requisite intellectual pitch, we read him with greater ease than 
a less abstract but more intangible and feeble writer. Phaeton's 
sonnet is not a large field to experiment upon ; but, as nearly as I 
can judge, it requires very much the same intellectual strain as one of 
Shakespeare's sonnets. Let the reader compare it for himself with 
the sonnets of Sidney, Daniel, Drayton, and Shakespeare ; he will be 
struck both with special expressions and with a certain clear firmness 
and boldness in the general method. Phaeton's sonnet, in fact, first 
struck me as being Shakespeare's some thirteen years ago, when I had 
been spending some weeks over the sonnet literature of the Elizabethan 
period. I had met with the sonnet before and been sufficiently im- 
pressed by it to copy it out simply as a very superior specimen of the 
commendatory sonnet ; but it did not strike me as Shakespeare's till 
I happened to take it up when my mind was full of the styles of the 
various sonneteers of the time. I afterwards made the detailed com- 
parisons which are here set forth. 

On the whole I venture to think that I have altogether produced a 
sufficient number of presumptions in favour of the identification of 
Shakespeare and Phaeton to warrant me in submitting the sonnet to 
the consideration of those who take an interest in such matters. If 
this sonnet is Shakespeare's, it was the first known composition of his 
that saw the light of print. When we remember how the player was 
jeered at by University men for trying to write plays and thus attempt- 
ing the task of the learned, we see a characteristic meaning in his use 
of the name ' Phaethon.' 

Of course, seeing that Phaeton's sonnet appeared in 1591, it is open 
to anybody to argue that Shakespeare may have read the sonnet, and 



AN UNRECOGNISED SONNET BY SHAKESPEARE ? 38 1 

been so impressed by it that it formed his whole habit in dealing with 
the Seasons for the rest of his life. For any critic who is base enough 
to upset my elaborate arguments in this way, I have no answer but 
astonished silence. 



A few particulars may be added about John Florio, to whom the 
sonnet was addressed. He was the most eminent teacher of Italian 
in London at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seven- 
teenth century, and ultimately numbered Prince Henry and the Queen 
among his pupils. Naturally also at a time when the literature of 
Italy was exercising so powerful an influence on our own, he was a 
favourite with poets. Ben Jonson presented a copy of ' The Fox ' to 
him with the inscription, " To his loving father and worthy friend, 
master John Florio, Ben Jonson seals this testimony of his friendship 
and love." 

Florio was born in London in 1545, his parents being Itahan refugees, 
belonging to the persecuted sect of the Waldenses. During the reign 
of Mary, they had to seek an asylum on the Continent, but Florio re- 
appeared in 1576 as tutor to a son of the Bishop of Durham, at Magda- 
len College, Oxford. His first publication was in 1578, an extraordi- 
nary collection of wise sayings on all subjects from Italian authors. It 
bore the alliterative and punning title- — 'Florio, his First Fruits.' 
Shakespeare was evidently familiar with this storehouse of gnomic 
wisdom, which deserves the attention of the New Shakspere Society. 
It was dedicated to the Earl of Leicester. Thereafter Florio, who 
loved to subscribe himself " Resolute John Florio,'' and was evidently 
a man of great energy and industry as well as learning and wit, matric- 
ulated at Oxford, his college being Magdalen, and apparently re- 
mained there for some time teaching Italian and French to certain 
scholars of the University. His 'Second Fruits' appeared in 1591. 
This is the work to which Phaeton's sonnet is prefixed. It would 
appear from the preface that by this time he was established in Lon- 
don, and was already engaged on his most laborious work, an Italian 
dictionary, which was published in 1598, under the title 'A World of 
Words.' In the preface to this last book, he speaks of himself as 
having been for some years in " the pay and patronage" of the Earl of 
Southampton, Shakespeare's first patron. There is a curious passage 
in the address to the reader, which seems to refer to Phaeton's sonnet : 
" There is another sort of leering curs, that rather snarl than bite, 
whereof I could instance in one, who lighting upon a good sonnet of a 
gentleman's, a friend of mine, that loved better to be a poet than to be 
counted so, called the author a rymer, notwithstanding he had more 
skill in good poetry than my sly gentleman seemed to have in good 
manners or humanity." That this refers to Phaeton's sonnet is 
probable from the fact that the whole address is a boisterously vitu- 
perative retort in the manner of the period to some ' H. S.,' who had 
spoken disrespectfully of Florio's ' Second Fruits.' Florio's last pub- 
lication was a translation of Montaigne's essays, undertaken on the 
advice of Sir Edward Wotton, and prosecuted under the encourage- 
ment of six noble ladies, his pupils. This appeared in 1603. There- 



382 APPENDIX B. 

after Florio was fortunate enough to obtain royal patronage, and lived 
to the good old age of eighty, dying in 1625. To Warburton we owe 
the supremely absurd suggestion that this versatile Italian was the 
original of Holofernes in ' Love's Labour's Lost.' Shakespeare was 
conjectured to have thus caricatured him because he criticised the 
Chronicle Histories in vogue on the English stage when Shakespeare 
began to write. 



ADVERTISEMENTS. 



10 HIGHER ENGLISH. 

Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature. 

Designed mainly to show characteristics of style. By William Minto, 
M.A., Professor of Logic and English Literature in the University of 
Aberdeen, Scotland. 12rao. Cloth. 5GG pages. Mailing price, ^l.G5; 
for introduction, $1.50; allowance, 40 cents. 

rpHE main design is to assist in directing students in English 
composition to the merits and defects of the principal writers 
of prose, enabling them, in some degree at least, to acquire the one 
and avoid the other. The Introduction analyzes style : elements 
of style, qualities of style, kinds of composition. Part First gives 
exhaustive analyses of De Quincey, Macaulay, and Carlyle. These 
serve as a key to all the other authors treated. Part Second takes 
up the prose authors in historical order, from the fourteenth cen- 
tury up to the early part of the nineteenth. 



Hiram Corson, Prof. English Lit- 
erature, Cornell University : With- 
out going outside of this book, an ear- 
nest student could get a knowledge 
of English prose styles, based on the 
soundest principles of criticism, such 
as he could not get in any twenty 
volumes which I know of. 

Eatherine Lee Bates, Prof, of 
English, Wellesley College : It is of 
sterling value. 

John M. Ellis, Prof, of English 
Literature, Oberlin College : I am 
using it for reference with great in- 



terest. The criticisms and comments 
on authors are admirable — the best, 
on the whole, that I have met with 
in any text-book. 

J. Scott Clark, Prof of Rhetoric, 
Syracuse University : We have now 
given Minto's English Prose a good 
trial, and I am so much pleased that 
I want some more of the same. 

A. W. Long, Wo ford College, Sj^ar- 
tanburg, S.C. : I have used Minto's 
English Poets and English Prose the 
past year, and am greatly pleased 
with the results. 



The Introduction to Minto's English Prose. 

44 pages. 12mo. Paper, 15 cents. 

Reprinted in this form especially for the use of the C. L. S. C. 

Minto's Characteristics of the English Poets, 

from Chaucer to Shirley. 

By William Minto, M.A., Professor of Logic and English Literature 
in the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. 12mo. Cloth, xi + 382 pages. 
Mailing price, ^1.65; for introduction, $1.50; allowance, 40 cents. 

rPHE chief objects of the author are: (1) To bring into clear 
light the characteristics of the several poets ; and (2) to trace 
how far each was influenced by his literary predecessors and his 
contemporaries. 



HIGHER ENGLISH. 



11 



Selections in English Prose from Elizabeth to 

Victoria. 1580 -f 880. 

By James M. Garnett, Professor of the English Language and Liter- 
ature in the University of Virginia. 12mo. Cloth, ix + 701 pages. 
By mail, $1.65; for introduction, fl.50. 

rpHIS work includes selections from Lyly, Sidney, Hooker, Bacon, 
Ben Jonson, Browne, Fuller, Milton, Clarendon, Jeremy Taylor, 
Cowley, Temple, Dryden, Defoe, Swift, Addison, Steele, Boling- 
broke, Johnson, Hume, Goldsmith, Burke, Gibbon, Scott, Southey, 
Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, Hunt, Landor, De Quincey, Carlyle, and 
Macaulay. The selections are accompanied by such explanatory 
notes as have been deemed necessary, and will average some twenty 
pages each. The object is to provide students with the texts them- 
selves of the most prominent writers of English prose for the past 
three hundred years in selections of sufficient length to be charac- 
teristic of the author, and, when possible, they are complete works 
or sections of works. The book will serve as a companion volume 
to Minto's Manual of Ejiglhh Prose Literature, or may be used in 
connection with any other manual of English literature. 



J. M. Hart, Prof, of English , Cor- 
nell University : So far as I can see 
at a first glance, it seems just wliat 
I need. . . . The book promises me 
great comfort. 

T. W. Hunt, Prof, of English, 
Princeton College : I find in it that 
critical discrimination and keen lit- 
erary insight which I expected to 
find in a work from Professor Gar- 
nett. I am sure that it will be of 
practical service to all those who 
have to do witli the study and 
teaching of our English prose. 

Louise M. Hodgkins, Prof, of 
English, Wellesley College: It well 
supplements Minto, and well illus- 
trates English thought from Eliza- 
beth to Victoria. ... It is a fine 
book of selections, and I shall use 
it in my work. 



F. B. Gummere, Prof, of English, 
Ilaverford College : I like the plan, 
the selections, and the making of the 
book. 

James K. Truax, Prof, of English, 
Union College : It is a welcome ar- 
rival. Hitherto I have been com- 
pelled to send the students to the 
library for assignments in connec- 
tion with Minto. Henceforth it is 
possible to put an alcove into the 
hands of each student, in the shape 
of this timely volume, and to relieve 
him from many inconveniences that 
necessarily belonged to the other 
method. 

H. N. Ogden, West Virginia Uni- 
versity : The book fulfils my expec- 
tations in every respect, and will 
become an indispensable help in the 
work of ©ur senior English class. 



12 HIGHER ENGLISH. 

Sidney's Defense of Poesy. 

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Albert S. Cook, Professor 
of English in Yale University. r2mo. Cloth, xlv + 103 pages. By 
mail, yO cents ; for introduction, 80 cents. 

A S a classic text-book of literary aesthetics, Sidney's Defense 
has endurhig interest and value; but there is another good 
reason for the marked attention received by this book. The whole 
conception of the editor's work differs from the conventional idea. 
The notes are not mere items of learning, illustrative only of 
details. They are intended so to supplement the text of the 
author and the Introduction that the study of the connected 
whole, on lines indicated by the Specimen Questions and Topics, 
shall be a cumulative process, expanding and enriching the mind 
of the student, as well as informing it regarding the views of a 
distinguished and representative man who lived in one of the most 
vital period's in the history of our literature. This idea will make 
itself manifest as the cumulative process is carried on. Something 
of the character of Sidney as a man, of the grandeur of his theme, 
of the significance of poetry, of sound methods of profiting by 
poetry and of judging it, — ought to be disclosed by study of the 
book. Everything is considered with reference to the learner, as 
far as possible ; and the point of view is not exclusively that of 
the grammarian, the antiquary, the rhetorician, or the explorer of 
Elizabethan literature, but has been chosen to include something 
of all these, and more. 



George L. Kittredge, Prof, of 
English, Harvard University : It is 
extremely well done, and ought to 
be extremely useful. 

William Minto, Prof, of Litera- 
ture, Universitij of Aberdeen: It 
seems to me to be a very thorough 
and instructive piece of work. The 
interests of the student are consulted 
in every sentence of the Introduction 
and Notes, and the paper of questions 
is admirable as a guide to the thor- 
ough study of the substance of the 
essay. There is no surplusage, no 
flabbiness. 



F. B. Gummere, Prof, of English 
and German, Haverford College: It 
is a wholly admirable piece of work, 
and has already done good service in 
my class. 

John F. Genung, Professor of 
Rhetoric, Amherst College : It is the 
work of a true scholar, who at every 
step is mindful not only of the inter- 
est of the work as a monument of the 
past, but of its value for all time as 
an exposition of the art of poetry. 
Introduction and notes are alike ex- 
cellent, and the tasteful print and 
binding leave nothing to be desired. 



HIGHER ENGLISH. 



13 



The Best Elizabethan Plays. 

• Edited with an Introduction by William R. Thayek. 12mo. Cloth. 
611 pages. By mail, f 1.40; for introduction, $1.25. 

rpHE selection comprises The Jew of Malta, by Marlowe; The 
Alchemist, by Ben Jonson ; Philaster, by Beaumont and Fletcher ; 
The Two Noble Kinsmen, by Fletcher and Shakespeare ; and The 
Duchess of Malfi, by Webster. It thus affords not only the best 
specimen of the dramatic work of each of the five Elizabethan 
poets who rank next to Shakespeare, but also a general view of the 
development of English drama from its rise in Marlowe to its last 
strong expression in Webster. The necessary introduction to the 
reading of each play is concisely given in the Preface. Great care 
has been used in expurgating the text. 

This book has long been needed, and seems to be unanimously 
welcomed and recommended by the professors of English literature. 



Felix E. Schelling, Assist. Prof, 
of English, University of Pennsyl- 
vania: This has proved invaluable 
to me in my Seminar. All profes- 
sors of English literature must wel- 
come such intelligent and scholarly 
editions of our enduring classics. 

Charles F. Kichardson, Prof, of 

English, Dartmouth College : The 
book is an excellent one, intelligently 
edited, equipped with brief and sen- 
sible notes, and introduced by a 
preface of real critical insight. Alto- 
gether, it is well fitted for college 
use. 

Albert S. Cook, Prof, of English, 
Yale College : It will naturally be 
the book first resorted to by those 
who have gained some familiarity 
with Shakespeare, and who wish to 
compare and contrast him with his 
great, though lesser, rivals. It is to 
this edition they will turn, because 
they can nowhere else find the same 
masterpieces, or so large a number 
of equally fine ones, in so cheap, 
convenient, and well-printed a vol- 



ume, undisfigured by the coarseness 
of expression which occasionally sul- 
lied the pages of the original edi- 
tions, and which we are less willing 
than the Elizabethans to condone, in 
view of the vigor and high imagina- 
tion in which the dramas of this 
period abound. 

James A. Harrison, Pi-of. of Eng- 
lish, Washington and Lee Univer- 
sity : It strikes me as admirable. 
We have long wanted such a com- 
panion volume to our Shakespeares. 

I. N. Demmon, Prof, of English, 
University of Michigan : The idea 
of the book is in every way com- 
mendable, and the execution prg^ise- 
worthy. The study of Shakespeare 
has become so general in the schools 
that this important aid should meet 
with a hearty welcome alike from 
teacher and student. 

The Critic, Neio York : It is a 
most commendable attempt to intro- 
duce these fine old plays to students 
and teachers in a cheap and conven- 
ient form. 



I 



